Arash Abizadeh

Democratic Theory and Border Coercion No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders

The question of whether a closed border entry policy under the unilateral control of a democratic state is legitimate cannot be settled until we first know to whom the justification of a regime of control is owed. According to the state sovereignty view, the control of entry policy, including of movement, immigration, and naturalization, ought to be under the unilateral discretion of the state itself: justification for entry policy is owed solely to members. This position, however, is inconsistent with the democratic theory of popular sovereignty. Anyone accepting the democratic theory of political legitimation domestically is thereby committed to rejecting the unilateral domestic right to control state boundaries. Because the demos of democratic theory is in principle unbounded, the regime of boundary control must be democratically justified to foreigners as well as to citizens, in political institutions in which both foreigners and citizens can participate.

Does Collective Identity Presuppose an Other? On the Alleged Incoherence of Global Solidarity

Two arguments apparently support the thesis that collective identity presupposes an Other: the recognition argument, according to which seeing myself as a self requires recognition by an other whom I also recognize as a self (Hegel); and the dialogic argument, according to which my sense of self can only develop dialogically (Taylor). But applying these arguments to collective identity involves a compositional fallacy. Two modern ideologies mask the particularist thesiss falsehood. The ideology of indivisible state sovereignty makes sovereignty as such appear particularistic by fusing “internal” with “external” sovereignty; nationalism imagines national identity as particularistic by linking it to sovereignty. But the concatenation of internal sovereignty, external sovereignty, and nation is contingent. Schmitts thesis that “the political” presupposes an other conflates internal and external sovereignty, while Mouffes neo-Schmittianism conflates difference (Derrida) with alterity. A shared global identity may face many obstacles, but metaphysical impossibility and conceptual confusion are not among them.

Does Liberal Democracy Presuppose a Cultural Nation? Four Arguments

This paper subjects to critical analysis four common arguments in the sociopolitical theory literature supporting the cultural nationalist thesis that liberal democracy is viable only against the background of a single national public culture: the arguments that (1) social integration in a liberal democracy requires shared norms and beliefs (Schnapper); (2) the levels of trust that democratic politics requires can be attained only among conationals (Miller); (3) democratic deliberation requires communicational transparency, possible in turn only within a shared national public culture (Miller, Barry); and (4) the economic viability of specifically industrialized liberal democracies requires a single national culture (Gellner). I argue that all four arguments fail: At best, a shared cultural nation may reduce some of the costs liberal democratic societies must incur; at worst, cultural nationalist policies ironically undermine social integration. The failure of these cultural nationalist arguments clears the way for a normative theory of liberal democracy in multinational and postnational contexts.

On the Demos and Its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy, and the Boundary Problem

Cultural–nationalist and democratic theory both seek to legitimize political power via collective self-rule: Their principle of legitimacy refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is exercised. But such self-referential theories are incapable of jointly solving the distinct problems of legitimacy and boundaries, which they necessarily combine, once it is assumed that the self-ruling collectivity must be a prepolitical, in principle bounded, ground of legitimacy. Cultural nationalism claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it expresses the nations prepolitical culture, but it cannot fix cultural–national boundaries prepolitically. Hence the collapse into ethnic nationalism. Traditional democratic theory claims that political power is ultimately legitimized prepolitically, but cannot itself legitimize the boundaries of the people. Hence the collapse into cultural nationalism. Only once we recognize that the demos is in principle unbounded, and abandon the quest for a prepolitical ground of legitimacy, can democratic theory fully avoid this collapse of demos into nation into ethnos. But such a theory departs radically from traditional theory.

Democratic Legitimacy and State Coercion: A Reply to David Miller

I have argued that, to be democratically legitimate, a states regime of border control must result from political processes in which those subject to it? including foreigners?have a right of democratic participation. David Miller resists that conclusion by challenging my assumptions about the nature of, and relationship between, democratic legitimacy, state coercion, and autonomy. In particular, Miller rejects propositions (1.2) through (3.2) below:

Hobbes on the Causes of War: A Disagreement Theory

Hobbesian war primarily arises not because material resources are scarce; or because humans ruthlessly seek survival before all else; or because we are naturally selfish, competitive, or aggressive brutes. Rather, it arises because we are fragile, fearful, impressionable, and psychologically prickly creatures susceptible to ideological manipulation, whose anger can become irrationally inflamed by even trivial slights to our glory. The primary source of war, according to Hobbes, is disagreement, because we read into it the most inflammatory signs of contempt. Both cause and remedy are therefore primarily ideological: The Leviathans primary function is to settle the meaning of the most controversial words implicated in social life, minimize public disagreement, neutralize glory, magnify the fear of death, and root out subversive doctrines. Managing interstate conflict, in turn, requires not only coercive power, but also the soft power required to shape characters and defuse the effects of status competition.

Hobbes’s agnostic theology before Leviathan

Abstract Prior to 1651, Hobbes was agnostic about the existence of God. Hobbes argued that God’s existence could neither be demonstrated nor proved, so that those who reason about God’s existence will systematically vacillate, sometimes thinking God exists, sometimes not, which for Hobbes is to say they will doubt God’s existence. Because this vacillation or doubt is inherent to the subject, reasoners like himself will judge that settling on one belief rather than another is epistemically unjustified. Hobbes’s agnosticism becomes apparent once we attend to his distinctions between the propositional attitudes one might adopt towards theological claims, including supposing, thinking, having faith and knowing.

Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics

Reading Hobbes in light of both the history of ethics and the conceptual apparatus developed in recent work on normativity, this book challenges received interpretations of Hobbes and his historical significance. Arash Abizadeh uncovers the fundamental distinction underwriting Hobbess ethics: between prudential reasons of the good, articulated via natural laws prescribing the means of self-preservation, and reasons of the right or justice, comprising contractual obligations for which we are accountable to others. He shows how Hobbess distinction marks a watershed in the transition from the ancient Greek to the modern conception of ethics, and demonstrates the relevance of Hobbess thought to current debates about normativity, reasons, and responsibility. His book will interest Hobbes scholars, historians of ethics, moral philosophers, and political theorists.

Wage competition and the special-obligations challenge to more open borders

According to the special-obligations challenge to the justice argument for more open borders, immigration restrictions to wealthier polities are justified because of special obligations owed to disadvantaged compatriots negatively impacted by the immigration of low-skilled foreign workers. We refute the special-obligations challenge by refuting its empirical premise and draw out the normative implications of the empirical evidence for border policies. We show that immigration to wealthier polities has negligible impact on domestic wages and that only previous cohorts of immigrants are adversely affected. The special-obligations challenge therefore succeeds only if special obligations owed to previous immigrants justify closing borders to further immigration; we argue that they do not.