Eva Erman

Symposium 'The politics of international recognition'

Recognition plays a multifaceted role in international theory. In rarely communicating literatures, the term is invoked to explain creation of new states and international structures; policy choices by state and non-state actors; and normative justifiability, or lack thereof, of foreign and international politics. The purpose of this symposium is to open new possibilities for imagining and studying recognition in international politics by drawing together different strands of research in this area. More specifically, the forum brings new attention to controversies on the creation of states, which has traditionally been a preserve for discussion in International Law, by invoking social theories of recognition that have developed as part of International Relations more recently. It is suggested that broadening imagination across legal and social approaches to recognition provides the resources needed for theories with this object to be of maximal relevance to political practice.

In search of democratic agency in deliberative governance

In recent years, we have witnessed deliberative democracy take a ‘civil society turn’ to address the democratic deficit of global governance. In light of the present circumstances of world politics, it is argued that civil society offers a rich soil for reformulating democracy globally. This article engages in this debate with particular focus on democratic agency. It investigates the notion of democratic agency built into this deliberative civil society view with regard to its democratic qualities. This is done by problematizing a common feature underlying this view, here called the ‘separability premise’, which presumes that it is possible to define democracy as two or more separate core democratic qualities or mechanisms — most importantly, inclusive participation, accountability, authorization and deliberation — and that democracy increases the more one or more of these are strengthened. The article defends the thesis that the proposed political subject is not equipped to be a democratic agent insofar as the deliberative civil society view does not fulfil two basic requirements for an arrangement to qualify as minimally democratic, namely, political equality and political bindingness. The article concludes that insofar as we wish to hold on to a deliberative conception of democracy, something along the lines of Habermas’s two-track view is still our best bet for accommodating these two conditions, even in a transnational context, since it is able to avoid the problems connected with the separability premise.

Political Legitimacy in the Real Normative World: The Priority of Morality and the Autonomy of the Political

According to what has recently been labeled ‘political realism’ in political theory, ‘political moralists’ such as Rawls and Dworkin misconstrue the political domain by presuming that morality has priority over politics, thus overlooking that the political is an autonomous domain with its own distinctive conditions and normative sources. Political realists argue that this presumption, commonly referred to as the ‘ethics first premise’, has to be abandoned in order to properly theorize a normative conception of political legitimacy. This article critically examines two features of political realism, which so far have received too little systematic philosophical analysis: the political realist critique of political moralism and the challenges facing political realism in its attempt to offer an alternative account of political legitimacy. Two theses are defended. First, to the extent that proponents of political realism wish to hold onto a normative conception of political legitimacy, refuting wholesale the ethics first premise leads to a deadlock, since it throws the baby out with the bathwater by closing the normative space upon which their account of political legitimacy relies. This is called the ‘necessity thesis’: all coherent and plausible conceptions of political legitimacy must hold onto the ethics first premise. Secondly, accepting this premise – and thus defending an ethics first view – does not entail that the political domain must be seen as a subordinate arena for the application of moral principles, that political normativity is reduced to morality or that morality trumps other reasons in political decision making, as claimed by political realists. Rather, the ethics first view is compatible with an autonomous political domain that makes room for an account of political legitimacy that is defined by and substantiated from sources of normativity specifically within the political. This is called the ‘compatibility thesis’.

Political Equality in Transnational Democracy

This book is about the status of political equality under global political conditions. If political equality generally is considered a core feature of democracy, it has received little attention am ...

What Distinguishes the Practice-Dependent Approach to Justice?

The practice-dependent approach to justice has received a lot of attention in post-millennium political philosophy. It has been developed in different directions and its normative implications have been criticized, but little attention has been directed to the very distinction between practice-dependence and practice-independence and the question of what theoretically differentiates a practice-dependent account from mainstream practice-independent accounts. The core premises of the practice-dependent approach, proponents argue, are meta-normative and methodological. A key feature is the presumption that a concept of justice is dependent on the function or aim of the social practices to which it is supposed to be applied. Closely related to this meta-normative thesis is an interpretive methodology for deriving principles of justice from facts about existing practices, in particular regarding their point and purpose. These two premises, practice-dependent theorists claim, differentiate their account since (1) they are not accepted by practice-independent accounts and (2) they justify different principles of justice than practice-independent accounts. Our aim in this article is to refute both (1) and (2), demonstrating that practice-independent accounts may indeed accept the meta-normative and methodological premises of the practice-dependent accounts, and that we are given no theoretical reason to think that practice-dependent accounts justify other principles of justice for a practice than do practice-independent accounts. In other words, practice-dependent theorists have not substantiated their claim that practice-dependence is theoretically differentiated from mainstream accounts. When practice-dependent proponents argue for other principles of justice than mainstream theorists, it will be for the usual reason in normative theory: their first-order normative arguments differ.

Representation, equality, and inclusion in deliberative systems: desiderata for a good account

What has become known as ‘the systemic turn’ in the recent literature on deliberative democracy looks like a promising development. However, while much theorizing has been devoted to the question of what a deliberative system may look like, very little has been offered in terms of criteria for what is required for a system to be deliberative democratic. This paper aims to contribute to the systemic approach by setting out a number of desiderata that a satisfactory account of deliberative systems should consider when developing such criteria. This is done by analyzing the main properties of a deliberative system in relation to three essential aspects of democracy: representation, equality, and inclusion. Among other things, it is argued that when theorizing criteria for what a deliberative system requires, a systemic account should carefully distinguish between political and epistemic representation, between political and epistemic equality, and between political and epistemic inclusion.

What not to expect from the pragmatic turn in political theory

The central ideas coming out of the so-called pragmatic turn in philosophy have set in motion what may be described as a pragmatic turn in normative political theory. It has become commonplace among political theorists to draw on theories of language and meaning in theorising democracy, pluralism, justice, etc. The aim of this paper is to explore attempts by political theorists to use theories of language and meaning for such normative purposes. Focusing on Wittgensteins account, it is argued that these attempts are unsuccessful. It is shown that pragmatically influenced political theorists draw faulty epistemological, ontological and semantic conclusions from Wittgensteins view in their normative theorising, and it is argued that pragmatically influenced theories of language and meaning, however full of insight, cannot be put to substantial normative use in political theory. The general scope of the thesis is motivated by pointing to the general form of the argument and by moving beyond Wittgenstein to other philosophers of mind and language, illustrating how similar overextensions are made with regard to Robert Brandoms theory of language and meaning.

Multiple Citizenship: Normative Ideals and Institutional Challenges

Institutional suggestions for how to rethink democracy in response to changing state responsibilities and capabilities have been numerous and often mutually incompatible. This suggests that conceptual unclarity still reigns concerning how the normative ideal of democracy as collective self-determination, i.e. ‘rule by the people’, might best be brought to bear in a transnational and global context. The aim in this paper is twofold. First, it analyses some consequences of the tendency to smudge the distinction between democratic theory and moral theories of legitimacy and justice. Second, it develops a conceptual framework that distinguishes between necessary conditions, aspects and aims of democracy. On this basis it specifies three objectives of democracy, some of which may also hold for multilevel governance. It is argued that there are in principle at least three reasons to value democratic institutions: they are intrinsically justified to the extent that they distribute fair shares of political influence over decision-making; they are instrumentally justified to the extent that they secure several of our other best interests, one of which is our interest in non-domination; and finally, they are also instrumentally justified insofar as they secure the just distribution of other goods. The aim of this framework is not to develop a specific theory of multilevel governance but to point at important distinctions to be made and normative criteria to be specified. The intention is to take the debate forward by noting some of the issues that any satisfactory account must address. The framework lays out the grounds for analysing the institutional challenges facing legitimate multilevel governance through what is speculatively called ‘multiple citizenship’, understood in explorative terms, opening the door for the manifold roles that citizens could and ought to play in multilevel governance, not only as democratic agents, but also as agents of democracy and agents of justice.

Practice-dependence and epistemic uncertainty

ABSTRACT A shared presumption among practice-dependent theorists is that a principle of justice is dependent on the function or aim of the practice to which it is supposed to be applied. In recent contributions to this debate, the condition of epistemic uncertainty plays a significant role for motivating and justifying a practice-dependent view. This paper analyses the role of epistemic uncertainty in justifying a practice-dependent approach. We see two kinds of epistemic uncertainty allegedly playing this justificatory role. What we call ‘normative epistemic uncertainty’ emerges from dealing with the problem of value uncertainty in justifying applied principles when our higher-level principles are open-textured, that is, when their content is too vague or unclear to generate determinate prescriptions. What we call ‘descriptive epistemic uncertainty’ emerges from dealing with uncertainty about empirical facts, such as the problem of moral assurance, that is, the problem that the requirements of justice cannot go beyond arrangements that we can know with reasonable confidence that we can jointly establish and maintain. In both cases, practice-dependent theorists conclude that the condition of epistemic uncertainty justifies a practice-dependent approach, which puts certain restrictions on theorizing regulative principles and has wide-ranging practical implications for the scope of justice. Our claim in this paper is that neither kind of epistemic uncertainty justifies a practice-dependent approach.

Global political legitimacy beyond justice and democracy

Despite the broad consensus on the value of political legitimacy in global politics, there is still little agreement on what the specific regulative content of the principles of legitimacy ought to be. Two main paths have thus far been taken in the theoretical literature to respond to the legitimacy deficit in the global domain: one via the ideal of democracy, another via the ideal of justice. However, both have run into problems. The overall purpose of this paper is to examine these two paths in the endeavour to explore the possibilities of a third path, which investigates global political legitimacy (GPL) as a value that is at a basic level distinct from democracy and justice. The paper aims to fulfil two tasks. The conceptual task consists in identifying some characteristics of the concept of GPL that makes it distinct from political legitimacy generally, as well as showing its usefulness for normative theorizing. The normative task is twofold: first, to demonstrate that the value of GPL is reducible neither to democracy nor to justice; and second, to develop the contours of a dual account of GPL, in which both justice and democracy play essential roles.