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The Vicious Circles of Habermas’ Cosmopolitics

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Abstract

Habermas’ cosmopolitan project seeks to transform global politics into an emancipatory activity in order to compensate for the disempowering effects of globalization. The project is traced through three vicious circles which stem from Habermas’ commitment to intersubjectivity. Normative politics always raises a vicious circle because politics is only needed to the extent that an issue has become problematized through want of intersubjective agreement. At domestic level Habermas solves this problem by constitutionalizing transcendental presuppositions that political participants cannot avoid making. This fix will not work at the global level because it is pre-political as between human individuals. Habermas therefore premises cosmopolitics on the transformation of nation-states into sites of participatory politics, engagement in which will eventually ignite a global cosmopolitan consciousness. This transformation depends on the constitutionalization of existing UN structures and their enforcement of an undefined and (therefore) ‘uncontroversial’ core of human rights. Unable to ground this project in social practice, Habermas eventually disregards his own lodestar of intersubjectivity based in social practice by relying on the prediscursive concept of human dignity. This move is not merely philosophically inconsistent; it also opens the door to the moralization of politics and the imposition of human rights down the barrel of a gun.

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Notes

  1. The slide into post-political society caused by the colonization of the lifeworld by autonomous administrative and market systems was the motivation behind Between Facts and Norms.

  2. As an example, Habermas suggests that the UN Millennium Development Goals are over-ambitious; Habermas (2007), p. 336.

  3. Ensuring respect for human dignity was one of the core goals of the G.W. Bush administration’s National Security Strategy 2002, at 1.

  4. The UN Secretary-General of the time, Kofi Annan, established a High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change which produced a report advocating SC reform in 2004 entitled A more secure world: Our shared responsibility (available at: http://www.un.org/secureworld/. Accessed 01 July 2013). Annan supported the proposals in his report of the following year, In larger freedom: towards development, security and human rights for all (available at: http://www.un.org/largerfreedom/. Accessed 01 July 2013).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Phil Fennel, Ioannis Kalpouzos, Panu Minkkinen, Nell Munro and Jiří Přibáň for their invaluable comments and suggestions. Errors are, of course, my own.

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  1. School of Law, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Isobel Roele

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Roele, I. The Vicious Circles of Habermas’ Cosmopolitics. Law Critique 25, 199–229 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-014-9138-4

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