ON COSMOPOLITAN OCCUPATIONS

Abstract

Within the tradition of ‘civil society tribunals’, the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) was an unprecedented endeavour in global scale, scope, structure and sophistication. Embedded within the global antiwar movement from 2003 to 2005, the WTI's praxis is provocative on several counts. While addressing the entanglement of cosmopolitan human rights ideals with imperial politics, this essay reflects on competing grammars of justice and legitimacy imagined by WTI activists in response to the occupation of Iraq. It also critiques what I call the instrumentalization thesis of human rights. Promulgators of this thesis typically posit that agents pursuing a distinctly imperial project are insincerely mobilizing cosmopolitan human rights ideals. Further, in order to enquire into cosmopolitan politics occasioned by the war in Iraq, and to magnify its tensions, the essay focuses on particular dilemmas faced by WTI activists while mobilizing several theorists and jurists of (cosmopolitan) democracy and (global) justice in this action. In particular, the essay interprets the ultimate controversy within the WTI network occasioned by Amnesty International's 2005 campaign for a ‘human rights based constitution in Iraq’, as well as disagreements on the ‘sources’ of the WTI's own legitimacy at its founding meeting. These debates and disagreements, the essay argues, evidence cosmopolitical tensions between the human and the citizen, between universal principles and constituted autonomies of decision, between universal and national paradigms of justice. Among the questions the essay raises are the following. How can one distinguish the cosmopolitan ethos of concern and responsibility predicating the legitimacy of the WTI, from the cosmopolitan ethos which conferred legitimacy, ex ante or ex post facto, to the constitution of a liberated, ‘democratic’ Iraq? On the threshold between the legal and the legitimate, the rule and the exception, what is the foundation, if any, of human rights politics?

Keywords:

• antiwar movement
• cosmopolitanism and imperial politics
• human rights
• international law
• war on Iraq
• World Tribunal on Iraq

Acknowledgements

For their comments on the entire book manuscript from which this essay draws, I am grateful to Talal Asad, Ayse Berktay, Nicholas De Genova, Richard Falk, Biju Mathew, Brinkley Messick, and Geoffrey Waite.I am particularly intetted to Partha Chatterjee, I would also like to thank a multitude of commentators on earlier versions of this essay, especially Susan Buck-Morss and Vilma Santiago-Irizarry.

Notes

¹For the ‘Declaration of the Jury of Conscience of the World Tribunal on Iraq’, see the volume of Istanbul proceedings (Sökmen 2008: 492–502). Reprints are also available in Arnove (2006), Falk, Gendzier and Lifton (2006), and on the Internet.

²The proper naming of this tradition is a contested matter. While some scholars promote the terminology of citizens’ tribunals (Klinghoffer and Klinghoffer 2002; Borowiak 2008) or people's tribunals (Nayar 2006), I prefer to employ – and problematize – the name of civil society tribunals.

³The article appeared on 31 May 2003 in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Libération. For the English translation, see Habermas and Derrida (2003).

⁴For a conservative estimate of the protest's extensiveness, see BBC News (2003).

⁵A New York Times analysis asserted, two days after the global protests, that ‘the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion’ (Tyler 2003).

⁶Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004) offer clear statements of such an emergent era.

⁷For footage of the WTI's culminating session, shot for live broadcasting from Istanbul by the US-based satellite network Deep Dish TV, see the four-hour documentary produced by Drolet and Halleck (2005). Also see Dadak et al. (2007).

⁸For biographical information about the witnesses, the Panel of Advocates and the Jury of Conscience, see Sökmen (2008: 548–62).

⁹Douzinas, a scholar of critical jurisprudence, argues for example that the concept of human rights was ‘hijacked by governments who understood the benefits of a moral-sounding policy’ (2007: 33).

¹⁰Perry Anderson and Tariq Ali would be among these commentators. In the New Left Review Anderson speaks of ‘the banner of human rights’, which he identifies ‘first and foremost as the right of the international community to blockade, to bomb, to invade peoples or states that displease it’ (2002). Tariq Ali is equally dismissive when he speaks of ‘the interests of the United States, defined, of course, as “human rights”’ (1999: 62).

¹¹I have omitted translator's parenthesis following Derrida's ‘must’ – (il faut).

¹²Significantly, the book Cushman introduces thus – a collection of essays in support of the war from the perspective of liberal internationalism – is dedicated to ‘all those who have lost their lives in Iraq in the struggle against tyranny and for the human rights of the Iraqi people’.

¹³Although I will employ here Arato's qualification ‘ours’ to discuss liberal democracy, my motivation is not subscription but critique.

¹⁴The name of the BRussells Tribunal, an active part of the global WTI network, is intentionally spelled this way, to allude to the Russell Tribunal of 1967.

¹⁵In particular, the Declaration pronounced that ‘all laws, contracts, treaties, and institutions established under occupation which the Iraqi people deem inimical to their interests be considered null and void’ (WTI 2008: 499).

¹⁶A global WTI network debate is relevant in this context, which concerned the decision to employ one of the two alternative terms – ‘people of Iraq’ or ‘peoples of Iraq’ – in the common language of the WTI. This debate recognized that the choice between the singular and plural forms of ‘the people’ involved the possible presence of at least two (national) constituent powers in Iraq.

¹⁷Unfortunately, in his ambitious study, Hont does not discuss the status of the colonies that the French Revolution inherited. Nor does he mention how the colonized figured into such debates about the proper loci of ‘popular sovereignty’.

¹⁸The original name, explicitly indicating the ‘special’ status of the tribunal, was later changed to Iraqi High Tribunal.

¹⁹For a witness account of the US Department of State's meetings with international law and human rights experts to establish an ad hoc tribunal for Iraq (before and during the occupation), see the jurist M. Cherif Bassiouni's (2005) appraisal of the Iraqi Special Tribunal (IST). For another interpretation of the IST, in comparison with the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, see Çubukçu (2008).

²⁰The following reflections on the founding meeting of the WTI are based on my participation at the event, and a retrospective study of the meeting's transcripts from which I will provide some quotations here.

²¹For another analysis of the ‘legal’ and the ‘political’ perspectives’ operation in the WTI processes, see Nayar (2006). Contrary to his interpretation, the political perspective was more complicated in my opinion, internally differentiated along individualist/ethicist and antiwar/constitutive lines.

²²In fact, by situating the WTI in the tradition of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the ‘Nuremberg obligation’, Falk implicitly observes this complementarity, while also arguing that the proper context of the WTI is the ‘moral globalization’ of the 1990s, which had rallied support for humanitarian interventions worldwide. See Falk (2008a, 2008b).

²³On the question of the WTI's legitimacy and ‘representation’, observe Roy (2008a, 2008b) in contradistinction to Falk (2008a, 2008b).

²⁴This formulation is susceptible to the charge that it ‘falls prey’ to what Hans Lindahl calls ‘the metaphysics of presence that governs western constitutional orthodoxy: a collective subject is either represented by constituted powers or directly present to itself as a constituent power’, although Lindahl's own ‘ontology of collective selfhood’ is far from a revolt against this government (2007: 19).

²⁵To demonstrate, the banner of the BRussells Tribunal, used in local antiwar protests, would read (in English): ‘President Bush: The World Holds You Accountable!’ In Turkish, a language that has no precise equivalent for the term ‘accountability’, the WTI-Istanbul posters would carry the injunction Hesap Ver Bush! Hesap Ver Blair!: ‘Give account Bush! Give account Blair!’ Whereas in both cases the identity of the one held to account is announced, it is noteworthy that only in the Brussels call is the ‘identity’ of the subject holding another to account revealed, and revealed as ‘the world’. In Istanbul this subject is left unspecified, as it speaks the injunction to give account. Yet, another ambiguity attends the Brussels announcement, ‘President Bush: The World Holds You Accountable!’ Who is the author of this announcement? Is it ‘the world’, or a subject other than ‘the world’?

²⁶In the platform text that was produced at the founding meeting, the ‘sources’ of the WTI's legitimacy were presented as a cumulative list (WTI 2003).

²⁷Relevant for this understanding would be Derrida's attempt to separate political friendship from ‘its fraternal adherence, from its inclination to take on the economic, genealogical, ethnocentric, androcentric features of fraternity’ (2005: 237).

²⁸This question is inspired by Butler's searching meditation on ‘the subject's opacity to itself’, and the consequences of this situation for the possibility of ethical action (2005: 20).

²⁹Habermas (2003) defines imperial universalism – in alleged contradistinction to his egalitarian universalism – as the ‘universalism of old empires’.