Daniel Bray

Pragmatic ethics and the will to believe in cosmopolitanism

Recent conflicts and crises in international relations have tested the ethical commitments of many cosmopolitans. However, this article argues that cosmopolitanism can be morally compelling and practically useful if it is conceived pragmatically as a set of ideals that guide interactions concerning cross-border problems. It argues that a will to believe in cosmopolitanism can be rationally justified by historical achievements and present tendencies in social conditions. Cosmopolitan beliefs are warranted, first, by demonstrating the empirical relevance of cosmopolitan ethics as a ‘living option’ in a new era of interaction and interdependence. Second, a pragmatic reorientation of cosmopolitan theory is conducted to widen the basis for identifying cosmopolitan action and permit a reconstruction of its ideals appropriate to todays pluralistic world. Finally, cosmopolitan ideals of equality, critical intelligence, and intercultural dialogue are developed as guides to addressing cross-border problems, drawing on the issue of climate change to illustrate how they become operative. A pragmatic faith in these ideals is thus justified by empirical hypotheses concerning the historical tendencies and latent potentialities of human experience, rather than metaphysical premises attached to a supernatural force or universal Reason.

The geopolitics of Antarctic governance: sovereignty and strategic denial in Australia's Antarctic policy

ABSTRACT The governance of Antarctica has re-emerged as a geopolitical issue in the past decade due to the increased presence of China, India and Russia; the continents importance in understanding global climate change; and its economic potential as a source of marine, genetic and mineral resources. This article examines the challenges for the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) in this context and the consequences for Australias foreign policy in its dual role as both a territorial claimant and supporter of ATS norms of cooperative science and environmental protection. The central argument is that Antarctic ‘bifocalism’ is under pressure as increased commercial activity and problematic jurisdictional interfaces with other regimes create difficult regulatory challenges for the ATS and encourage assertions of sovereignty that cannot be resolved within the existing regime. Consequently, the author argues that it is vitally important for Australia to preserve the legitimacy of the ATS through a policy framework of ‘strategic denial’ that aims to prevent all states from acquiring sovereignty over Antarctic territory. Australia should therefore reject recent proposals to securitise Antarctic policy or pursue World Heritage listing because they involve assertions of sovereignty that risk fracturing the ATS and thus compromise Australias enduring interest in keeping Antarctica as ‘a continent of international cooperation and peace’.

Die Vorteile des Pragmatismus in Theorien Kosmopolitischer Gerechtigkeit

Abstract This article explores the Pragmatist and Rawlsian forms of cosmopolitanism that have emerged in recent decades in efforts to extend theories of justice to the global level. The Pragmatist approach is critical and problem-centred, using an account of the problematic situation and a reconstruction of inherited ideals to develop normative theories for action in a specific political context. The Rawlsian approach is abstract and systemic, deducing ideal institutional principles from thought experiments that require later implementation in the non-ideal world. The main argument of the article is that Pragmatists employ three methodological elements that give them important practical advantages over Rawlsians in providing action-guiding norms. First, a detailed account of the problem of injustice provides an indispensable empirical grounding that frames normative responses. Second, a critical reconstruction of the normative vocabulary relating to the problem ensures that the ideals used to guide action are historically relevant to the community of action. And finally, an account of normative theories in terms of their concrete requirements and means of realisation in the particular situation ensures they are attuned to its political constraints and possibilities for change.

Neo-liberal Governance and the Protest Politics of the Occupy Movement

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis precipitated a new wave of antineo-liberal activism directed at exposing the injustices of finance capitalism and its perversion of representative democracy. Inspired by the Arab Spring revolutions and the protest encampments of the Spanish Indignados, this activism spilled onto the streets of New York in September 2011 with a call to occupy Wall St in protest against ‘the damaging influence of corporations on politics’ (Adbusters, 2011). A month later, the ‘Occupy movement’ had spread to over 90 cities around the world, capturing public attention with slogans condemning rising inequality, austerity, corporate bailouts and the general disempowerment of ‘the 99%’. It also captured the public imagination in many countries with experiments in direct democracy that created alternative political communities within prominent hubs of corporate power. Tolerated at first, by early 2012 the major occupations had been evicted by municipal authorities. Today, the movement’s post-eviction repertoire of resistance has shifted from mass occupations to decentralised campaigns and street protests on a variety of issues ranging from housing foreclosures in the US to minority rights and social welfare in Slovenia (Razsa and Kurnik, 2012). This post-eviction activism relies on social media networks to maintain the mobilisation, solidarities and public attention created during the mass occupations.

Global Protests and Cosmopolitan Publicity: Challenging the Representative Claims of Nation-States

Abstract In the past decade, a global wave of protests has spread to both liberal democratic and authoritarian countries in which the representative claims of nation-states have been profoundly challenged. This article explores the extent to which these protest movements reflect cosmopolitan practices and possibilities. The central argument is that the protests created forms of ‘cosmopolitan publicity’ in which people engaged in transnationally connected social criticism and political contestation directed at rupturing the representative authority of their state. The article first provides an account of cosmopolitan publicity, arguing that it is produced by interaction across territorial and cultural borders in which open and egalitarian publics are formed to deal with shared problems. It then argues that varying degrees of cosmopolitan publicity were generated in the recent global protests by examining the transnational communication, tactics, and claims of the Arab Spring and Occupy social movements. Finally, the article argues that these protests are indicative of ongoing crises of representation that plague many nation-states and create opportunities for new forms of cosmopolitan politics.

The Sixth Oceanic Conference on International Studies: transitions in the Asia Pacific

The Sixth Oceanic Conference on International Studies (OCIS) was held in Melbourne, Australia between 9 and 11 July 2014. The conference was hosted by the School of Social and Political Sciences at University of Melbourne and supported by the Australian Institute of International Affairs, Deakin University, La Trobe University, Monash University, RMIT University and Swinburne University. The Sixth OCIS had a broad organizing theme of ‘transition’ focused on the changing balances of power shaping the Oceanic and Asia Pacific regions and related questions of social and political change in this context. Over 200 papers were presented at the conference, reflecting a wide variety of issues in international studies and related fields of scholarship. Amongst this diversity, the conference did have some recurring themes relating to great power rivalry, the influence of China, and the implications of multilateral frameworks and key bilateral relationships on the security and economic dynamics of the region. Significant attention was also devoted to analysing the foreign policies and political institutions for managing problems of peacebuilding, terrorism, gender inequality and sexual discrimination, people movements, climate change and financial instability at the regional and global levels. This special issue of Global Change, Peace and Security reflects these themes of transition in the Asia Pacific and comprises a diverse array of contributions from scholars attending this conference.

Conclusion: Pragmatic Cosmopolitanism and the Role of Leadership in Transnational Democracy

The perspective of pragmatic cosmopolitanism envisages the development of transnational democracy in and through the representative practices of cross-border problem-solving publics. This view recognizes that global political space is today comprised of interrelated issues rather than an integrated demos (Urbinati 2003: 80) — and that ‘governance’ in this context refers to coordinated action appropriate to the solution of specific problems (Rosenau 1998: 30–2). In the previous two chapters I grounded this approach in Deweyan ethics that highlighted the indispensability of critical intelligence and imaginative representation in generating transnational democratic publics. I also argued that these ethics imply an equal right to democratic conditions of intelligent self-development and that this principle of justice provides the normative warrant for democratic reconstruction at a time when cross-border transactions increasingly impact on the self-transformative capacities of individuals and their communities. Using this contingent foundation, I provided a reconstructed ideal of representative democracy aimed at ameliorating contemporary democratic deficits in global politics.

The Deficits of Democratic Representation in Global Politics

The idea of state autonomy has framed our modern democratic paradigm. For the past century (at least), political theorists have argued incessantly about the meaning of democracy, but for the most part have linked democratic ideals with an autonomous society bounded by the territorial borders of the nation-state. Indeed, as Walter Lippmann (1997[1922]: 172) puts it, democratic theory requires ‘as little disturbance as possible of the premise of a self-contained community.’ Furthermore, the associated image of Westphalian sovereignty has served to maintain the sharp distinction between domestic and international realms, allowing many democratic theorists to legitimately ignore the wider global context in which national democracies are embedded. Today, however, the increased prominence of cross-border issues has highlighted the uneven ways in which processes of globalization has impacted on the political autonomy of nation-states and blurred the boundaries between domestic and international issues. The accompanying proliferation of supranational institutions with considerable decision-making power but questionable democratic credentials has focused attention on so-called democratic deficits in global politics. In this environment, serious questions are raised about the future of democratic life if we maintain an exclusive relationship between democracy and the nation-state under conditions of contemporary globalization.

John Dewey and the Democratic Ideal

So far in this book I have outlined the problematic consequences of globalization for modern democracy and developed a new conceptual vocabulary of political representation for addressing this situation. At this point, I am now in a position to articulate a distinctive approach that can provide normative responses. To this end, in the remainder of this book I draw on the moral and political resources contained in the work of John Dewey to outline an approach to transnational democracy that I call ‘pragmatic cosmopolitanism.’ As I explained in the Introduction, this approach is ‘pragmatic’ because it is broadly developed from a Deweyan philosophy that rejects the traditional search for fixed ends, ultimate principles or a priori knowledge that exist above and beyond human experience. It instead takes lived experience as its starting point and locates normative ethics in a particular methodological approach that stipulates how to interact in morally problematic situations. My approach is broadly cosmopolitan in the sense that it grounds this movement towards transnational democracy in the growth of social individuals through a shared human capacity for intelligent self-transformation. I use this particular interpretation of human freedom as the normative warrant for transnational democracy at a time when cross-border associations increasingly impact on the self-development of individuals and their communities. My approach thus contains a cosmopolitan ethic that demands the extension of moral and political boundaries across existing national borders.

Representative Claims and Global Politics

In this chapter I explore in greater detail the notion of the representative claim and extend the analytical insights of this approach to global politics. The primary aim is to rethink the ontological characteristics of political representation in more depth in order to open up the field of possibilities for normative theorizing in transnational and global contexts. To this end, we require an approach to representation that allows us to recognize a variety of different representative practices, particularly the familiar non-democratic cases that arise in global institutions. A narrow approach that appeals to liberal democratic norms to recognize a case of political representation is unable to explain, for example, how non-elected heads of state can legitimately claim to represent their nation-states in the United Nations and must therefore come to the puzzling conclusion that these leaders are not in any sense political representatives. As Andrew Rehfeld (2006: 2) points out, when Nikita Khrushchev slammed his shoe on the podium of the United Nations, observers had no problem recognizing that he was the representative of the Soviet Union despite his questionable democratic credentials.