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Abstract
The public sphere and public reason have recently become key ideas in global governance, with most scholars expressing related transparency and accountability concerns. This article contends that if transnational public sphere(s) and the use of reason in global policy-making aim to reinforce the common good and justice, they must go beyond the procedural concerns of transparency and accountability, with the proviso being that legitimacy be derived from the people. To this end, the author argues that, we must consider social ontology to unpack or deconstruct at least three hegemonic philosophical presuppositions that now inform global policy-making processes: a positivist approach to scientific knowledge; the Lockean view on the way in which the state, the economy, and society relate; and the putative monolithic perception of the transnational. It is suggested that procedural accounts coupled with positivist ontology may reinforce neoliberal hegemony, opening an empty space between political decisions and interests while obviating the will of the people.
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Notes
1 Bexell et al. (Citation2010, p. 88) suggest that ‘transnational actors may help hold international institutions accountable through legal redress, monitoring of commitments, and policy evaluation'.
2 Fraser (Citation2007) reconsidered the public sphere theory transnationally to remove the artificial separation of the international governance from the governance of national territories. Fraser's critique is based on the observation that the six building blocks of the traditional public sphere theory of Habermas have now become counterfactual. First, addressees of public deliberations are not sovereign states any more. Second, the interlocutors of public communication are not restricted to national citizens. Third, economic governances now have been open to the influence of international and extra-state actors. Fourth, the infrastructure of national communication has changed due to rise in privately owned media companies and private broadcasting that privilege more populist programming. Fifth, the public sphere is not mediated via a single national language in most countries. Sixth, the public sphere could hardly be grounded on a national vernacular literature today because of the more global and hybrid nature of the contemporary literature (Fraser, Citation2007, pp. 15–19). While all the points raised by Fraser influence democracy, I have focused on only the loss of undivided sovereignty and the loss of the state's control of economic governance, which seem to be more pertinent to the main aims of the present paper.
3 To underline this aspect, Eriksen and Sending (Citation2013) proposed considering the public (sphere) as a consequential concept, thus validating it against empirical practices and power structure.
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Acar Kutay
Acar Kutay obtained Ph.D. degree in Political Science and Public Administration from the Middle East Technical University, Turkey. He worked previously as a research fellow at the University of Bergen, where he engaged in an international research project, Eurosphere, funded by the European Union. In Norway, he also held researcher positions in Chr. Michelsen Institute and Uni Research Rokkan Centre. His research mainly focuses on political and social theory, with a particular interest in the contemporary political issues in Europe and Turkey. Kutay is the author of the book Governance and European civil society: Discourse, governmentality and NGOs, Routledge, 2014. He has also published in Critical Policy Studies, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Javnost—the Public, and European Law Journal (forthcoming). He currently conducts postdoctoral research at Lund University, Department of Political Science, working on constitutional theory and republican political philosophy.