Book Review
Jürgen Habermas, The Divided West Polity: Cambridge 2006, paperback 224 pp., 0-7456-3519-9
ANASTASIA MARINOPOULOU
Towards a Transnational Public Sphere?
The publication of a new book by Habermas has inaugurated, for at least the last thirty years, a multifarious range of discourses throughout the realms of philosophy and politics. The present book, released in Germany in 2004, displays the continuation of a certain problematic which literally commences in the nineties with Between Facts and Norms and a series of subsequent books, namely The Inclusion of the Other, The Postnational Constellation and Time of Transitions. The latter books initiate concerns referring to the social transition from legality to legitimacy, the internal connection between law and politics and the potential public use of reason so that social rationality would achieve a viable and ‘rational’ form.
Habermas focuses on the latter points being mainly inspired by historical events of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, such as the downfall of the Berlin Wall, the attack on the Twin Towers and most recently the war in Iraq. These concerns evolve through a series of arguments marked by a scope of referral to states and peoples, to the formation of national law and deliberative politics or to social transitions within a state through the expression of individual need. In his latest book The Divided West he passes more concretely to more global, inclusive concerns. He opens up and expands his argumentation and critique not only towards state or national societies but also towards global politics and transnational legal and political potentialities.
The title itself introduces the latter points by identifying normative disagreement that divides the western world and consists in the incompatibility of the economic with the political sphere. The economic integration of states that is set forward by multinational treaties does not necessarily or deterministically entail political or
cultural consensus among nation states. Universal political claims seem neither so universal, nor so binding, nor so valid so as to determine and ensure the ‘equal and reciprocal hearing … of all those affected’ in Habermas’ words.
Habermas attributes this disagreement mainly to the asymmetry created between the interrelations of the political constellation with law within a state and the international law. The former act as a political binding force of a state society while the latter bears the same aim but on an international level without, however, deriving its power from different state societies being united to promote political dialogue and agreement which find expression and realization in law. Furthermore, the political power of international law, being unconstrained by a concrete political sphere, brings forward political distortion and cultural deformation within states as well as on an international level subsequently.
As an alternative, intercommunication between state law and international law in this sense, bearing thus an intrinsic political nature, results in the imposition of restrictions on the sovereignty of individual states under a cosmopolitan rule of law represented and sustained by internationally accepted political institutions, instead of sovereign states manifesting an insufficient international perspective of law. Internationally accepted political institutions bear the potentiality to regulate interactions among states with a view to form a civil constitution presupposing thus a community of states bound by normative agreement concerning politics and law.
Nevertheless, even when all economic institutions are being unified and harmoniously collaborate, political coordination seems to be at a loss to integrate and configure social systems. In more concrete terms, even when European states seem to accept economic restrictions fully and succeed in coordinating them on a European integrated scale, the configuration and political application of a European constitution falls short of the demands and appeals of European peoples. Habermas turns his problematics towards the consideration of a cosmopolitan rule of law as a global political binding force. In this way the twentieth first century marks a transition from international law to a cosmopolitan society with a rational face and a viable dialectics between the national and the international field.
Once more Habermas sets the notion of the public sphere at the centre of his work, but in this book the notion is contextualized with a view to a transnational public sphere that would relocate civic solidarity socially through the mutual networking of public spheres. Habermas seeks to promote a European identity beyond national
boundaries where political civic identity is formed through political processes of cosmopolitan institutionalisation.
A common European consciousness or, in other words, a collective identity crystallizes around certain moral, legal and political values and principles forming thus a pan-European political public sphere. This transnational public sphere was shaped to a great extent through common processes of identity consciousness formation which were characterized by the acceptance of secularization, the priority of the state over the market, the primacy of social solidarity over ‘merit’, skepticism concerning technology, awareness of the paradoxes of progress, rejection of the law of the stronger and a commitment to peace. What remains for a transnational public sphere to achieve is probably the central concern of Habermas’ problematics.
The suggestion that communicative use of reason can find practice not only within state democracies but also beyond a state level and within political institutions that deal with procedures of international legality questions the viability of a rational cosmopolitan model of democracy. In other words, for Habermas, a transnational deliberative democratic process of legitimation calls for a transnational public sphere that stems from a communicative use of reason of multiple public spheres within nation-states. In fostering democracy beyond the state level we need a cosmopolitan rule of law that fosters a cosmopolitan rationality.
Especially the latter term that is set as a prospective goal for present and future societies depends on a communicative use of reason, namely on tolerance of civil disobedience and on the mutual recognition of all involved parts, on equal respect and reciprocal consideration within a universalistic discourse so that democracy is realised.
A cosmopolitan rationality presupposes the formation of a cosmopolitan consciousness that takes shape not because of legal restrictions, but through collective social and trans-social processes. At this point a redefinition of the social aim of law might be indispensable. Trans-social integration seems possible not only due to transnational legal coordination but mostly with the help of law so that the function of the political sphere finds itself in conjunction with legal processes.
Apart from law the relocation of the political back to the social agenda can be accessed by means of a communicative interrelation of all public spheres (within a European area for instance) that would render civil society unruptured from state or international law. This would also render law itself unruptured and renewed, oriented
towards the formation of a cosmopolitan rule based on multiple coordination of the public spheres.
The problems that today’s societies and states face are of a political nature and cannot be anticipated solely based on administrative or functional decisions, either the latter concern common markets or legal frames associated with nation states, namely weak perspectives and unstable political coordination. Especially legal interests need not serve as ends in themselves or be socially limited and politically absolutist, but should mostly undergo processes of mutual intercommunication with the public spheres and civil society so that states would be occupied with the formation of a cosmopolitan rationality presupposing the realization of cosmopolitan law. These processes entail not only the extension of the potentialities of legal concerns but also the extension and full exploitation of deliberative democratic interests that give shape to a cosmopolitan rationality by means of forming a transnational public sphere.
For Habermas legality is not the only royal way to legitimacy. This path also includes the transition of legal imperatives if they are considered fruitless for public spheres and for a public use of reason by societies and states. Nowadays, European societies and states are characterized by the transition from national boundaries to the formation of a pan-European public sphere which impacts political institutions and leads to the formation of cosmopolitan law and rationality.
Political dynamics on a European scale cover the dynamics of a future international law, namely a cosmopolitan law, so that the latter would realize a normative legal development that appeals to the public spheres’ concerns. These concerns regard participation in the political sphere for individuals and political collectivities and the interest in a viable, democratic rationality, namely a social and political rationality that has a human face for individuals and societies.
Published in Philosophical Inquiry, Vol. XXIX, no. 3 - 4 (Summer – Fall 2007).
