Hauke Brunkhorst

The co-evolution of cosmopolitan and national statehood – Preliminary theoretical considerations on the historical evolution of constitutionalism

The article claims that we should not just look towards a utopian future in fulfilling a claim about realization of a cosmopolitan, non-national world order. Already during antiquity the idea of a transcendent universal order took on a differentiated form at the same time as there happened to be institutionalization. Since the legal revolution of the long 12th century, this duality has been constitutional and has had a hierarchical structure. However, not only was the invention legal, it was also organizational; hence, the modern political, legal and organizational powers emerged long before the more celebrated state-building processes of the 16th and 17th centuries. The point is that the order was both political and cosmopolitan, institutional and universal. The nation-state was an exception compared with this long and widespread legacy of cosmopolitan power. But the universality of subjective rights was re-institutionalized according to principles that excluded inequalities. This was set in motion even before the UN Charter, not just with the ideas of 1789 but also institutionalized in Roosevelt’s New Deal together with the social and political rights that were institutionalized specifically as a consequence of the World Wars and the political claims that followed.

Dialectical snares: human rights and democracy in the world society

The paper starts with a thesis on the dialectical structure of modern law that goes back to the European revolutionary tradition and constitutes a legal structure that is at once emancipatory and repressive. Once it became democratic, the modern nation state has solved more or less successfully the crises that have emerged in modern Europe since the 16th Century. Yet, this state did not escape the dialectical snares of modern law and modern legal regimes. Its greatest advance, the exclusion of inequalities, presupposed the exclusion of the internal other of blacks, workers, women, etc., and the other that stemmed from the non-European world that furthermore was under European colonial rule or other forms of European, North American, or Japanese imperial control. Yet, the wars and revolutions of the 20th Century led to a complete reconstruction, new foundation, and globalization of all national and international law. The evolutionary advance of the 20th Century was the emergence of world law, and this enabled the construction of international and national welfarism and the global expansion of the exclusion of inequalities. Nevertheless, the dialectic of enlightenment returned and led to new forms of post-national domination, hegemony, oppression, and exclusion. The final section of the paper tries to detect some ideas and principles for how to overcome the crisis.

Rights and the Sovereignty of the People in the Crisis of the Nation State

Following Hannah Arendts work on totalitarianism, the first part of the paper gives an account of the historical advances of the republican nation state that was born during the constitutional revolutions in France and America at the end of the eighteenth century. This state has organised an efficient solidarity among strangers by means of democratic legislation. The European nation state was particular and universal at once. As Arendt could demonstrate on the Dreyfus affair, republicanism of a specific people was based on the Jacobean patriotism of universal human rights. In the second part an explanation is laid out for the destruction of the European nation state during the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. Beginning with Arendts thesis on the imperialist society that blurred the borders of state, this thesis is revised with reference to the sociological theory of modern society (Luhmann, Habermas). The last part then turns to the rebirth of the nation state after World War Two and the postimperialist development of globalisation at the same time. Again progress in globalising human rights and civil society is threatened by the uncontrolled expansion of capital and power. The lasting problem is to find any regional or global functional equivalent for the democratic rule of law that for so long only worked on the level of the nation state.

The transformation of solidarity and the enduring impact of monotheism: Five remarks

This article evaluates two opposing approaches to the Western transition from a monotheistic and metaphysically grounded religious dispensation to secularized modern political theory. Where some philosophers emphasize the independence of modern political ideals, others argue that these ideals cannot remain theoretically coherent or practically effective once they are separated from the religious sources that have given rise to them. The theory of communicative action can bring together the insights of both independency and dependency theorists, thereby accounting for the public-political significance of redemptive criticism and other important forms of religious discourse. Yet given that religious groups are no longer embedded within the nation state, an additional and pressing contemporary challenge is to develop an adequate constitutional framework for global society.

Reply: States with constitutions, constitutions without states, and democracy - Skeptical reflections on Scheuerman’s skeptical reflection

Let me first thank Bill Scheuerman for his long and rich argument on my different considerations of global and European constitutionalism and democracy. It was an inspiring reading, and I have learnt a lot by it. I agree with most of his basic assumptions, and even with some of his more critical remarks. Here, I will first take the opportunity to make some revisions and clarify some conceptual misunderstandings. I will then make some additional remarks on my theoretical framework, and the ideas of law and constitution which are fundamental for it. In the last section I discuss again the issue of state and constitution about which Scheuerman and I already had a short controversy in Constellations last year.1 This time, however, I will discuss the development of modern society in a broader historical, or evolutionary, perspective.

Democratic Solidarity under Pressure of Global Forces: Religion, Capitalism and Public Power

Since the 1970s, not only the economy but also religion has become global. In particular the network religions (loosely coupled sects) and the old global church of Rome belong to the winners of globalization. Yet the prize is high, and it has to be paid by the nation state that loses control over markets as well as over global religious networks. For this reason the article opens with a reflection on secularization and the possible dependency of modem democracy on religious sources of solidarity. Whereas the article rejects the thesis that modern democracy can never stand alone, only relying on the sources of enlightenment and a completely secularized world view, it presumes that there is an inner linkage between monotheist Messianism of redemption and the utopian spirit of modern democracy, and that without this spirit democracy will vanish from earth. The solution of this problem is important for the understanding of the coming global crisis of democracy, which is discussed in the last parts of the article.

Some Conceptual and Structural Problems of Global Cosmopolitanism

The chapter develops the thesis of the co-evolution of national and transnational (or international) statehood further, which was introduced by a couple of earlier essays of Chris Thornhill, Matthias Albert and the author. The particular concern of the chapter is democracy. It is assumed that democracy is not just an invention of the national state but has deep roots in both national and international public law and its evolution. However, evolution must not support democracy; it can also turn against it. This is discussed with respect to the project of cosmopolitanism. As it has been realised during the process of globalisation, it is not yet democratic, and turns out to be in ever greater tension to democratic principles and hopes. A good example is the EU. However, the game is not yet over because technocratic cosmopolitanism without democracy has to face serious problems of legitimisation.

Revolutionary constitutions: Arendt's inversions of Heidegger

Hannah Arendts most ingenious philosophical idea was to transform Heideggers ontological difference of being (Sein) and existing (Seiende). Whereas for Heidegger existing was founded in being as the origin of all meaning, for Arendt existing, in the form of the concrete historical praxis of ‘political animals’ in space and time (as she suggests in Vita Activa), founds being. This is exemplified in modern revolutionary praxis as in the French and American Revolutions (as she suggests in On Revolution). The problem then becomes that of maintaining the original revolutionary power in a power-founding constitutional order.

Düstere Aussichten – Die Zukunft der Demokratie in der Weltgesellschaft

Von meinen sieben Thesen singt die erste das zögerliche Lob der alt gewordenen Gestalt des Nationalstaats, die zweite bestimmt das moderne Recht der „westlichen Rechtstradition“ als gleichzeitig repressiv und emanzipatorisch, die dritte stellt den Nationalstaat in seinen imperialen Schatten, die vierte behauptet einen grundstürzenden normativen Fortschritt für das 20. Jahrhundert, die fünfte sieht in der (nur liberalen) Konstitutionalisierung der Weltgesellschaft nicht schon die Lösung, sondern einen Teil des Problems undemokratischer Weltherrschaft, die sechste zeichnet ein düsteres Bild der Globalisierung von Markt, Macht und Religion, und die siebte verspricht auch kein gutes Ende, setzt aber eine schwache Hoffnung in den demokratischen Rechtsformalismus, was zumindest die Juristen meist erfreut. 1. Der subjektive Geist der großen Verfassungsrevolutionen des 18. Jahrhunderts hat seine erste objektive Gestalt im modernen Nationalstaat gefunden. Sie ist bis heute das Paradigma demokratischer Rechtsstaatlichkeit geblieben. Dieser Staat, ob demokratisch oder nicht, war von Anfang an ein administratives Ungeheuer, ein bürokratischer Überwachungsund Kontrollstaat, ein Staat entfesselter Exekutivmacht.1 Aber im Zuge seiner Demokratisierung, die ihm und den jeweils in ihm herrschenden Klassen in fortgesetzten sozialen Kämpfen, Revolutionen und Kriegen schließlich abgetrotzt worden ist, hat dieser Staat nicht nur die unkontrollierten Kettenreaktionen unter Kontrolle gebracht, die durch die Abspaltung der großen Schicksalsmächte des modernen Lebens, der desozialisierten Religion (Weber) vom klerikalen Universalstaat, der freien Arbeits-, Geld und Immobilienmärkte (Polanyi) vom ständischen Schichtungssystem und der politischen Exekutivmacht (Marx) von herrschaftlicher Gewalt ausgelöst worden sind.2 Der Nationalstaat – erste These – hat nicht nur die administrative Macht zur Kontrolle der entfesselten Produktivkraft Kommunikation hervorgebracht, sondern diese Macht auch erfolgreich eingesetzt, um zumindest innerhalb seiner Grenzen Ungleichheit auszuschließen.3 Es ist ihm im Verlauf des nicht nur totalitären 20. Jahrhunderts schließlich gelungen, (1) die von den protestantischen Motivationskrisen und Revolutionen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts entfesselte Freiheit der Religion zusammen mit der Freiheit von der Religion in politischen Teilhaberechten zu verankern und damit Aufklärung und Religion als Quellen nationaler Solidarität zu erschließen; (2) durch demokratisches Staatsorganisationsrecht, das mehr noch als die Menschenrechte die eigentliche Innovation der Legitimationskrisen und Verfassungsrevolutionen des 18. Jahrhunderts war, die Freiheit des öffentlichen Le-

THE PRODUCTIVITY OF POWER: HANNAH ARENDT'S RENEWAL OF THE CLASSICAL CONCEPT OF POLITICS

Resumen es: este articulo resume la concepcion de poder desarrollada por hannah arendt. Esta se basa en la conviccion de arendt de que el nacimiento de los gobierno...