|
March 13, 2005
Here is an article on external relations between nation-states by Perry Anderson to read whilst I make my way back to Canberra. Entitled 'Arms and Right: Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio in an Age of War', it deals with these philosopher's concerns for a desirable liberal international order.
Both Rawls and Habermas refer back to Kant's utopian 'For a Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch of 1795.' I say utopian because Kant, as Anderson says:
"Kant had believed, by the gradual emergence of a federation of republics in Europe, whose peoples would have none of the deadly impulses that drove absolute monarchs continually into battle with each other at the expense of their subjects---the drive for glory or power. Rather, interwoven by trade and enlightened by the exercise of reason, they would naturally banish an activity so destructive of their own lives and happiness."
This never happened in the 19th or the 20th century. Is it happening with the UN? Does Kant's vision come to life after 1945?
Anderson says that Habermas thought so. Anderson briefly outlines Habermas' take on Kant:
"Kant's institutional scheme for a perpetual peace has proved wanting. For a mere foedus pacificum---conceived by Kant on the model of a treaty between states, from which the partners could voluntarily withdraw---was insufficiently binding. A truly cosmopolitan order required force of law, not mere diplomatic consent....The transformative step [that is] still [needed] to be taken [is] for cosmopolitan law to bypass the nation-state and confer justiciable rights on individuals, to which they could appeal against the state. Such a legal order required force: an armed capacity to override, where necessary, the out-dated prerogatives of national sovereignty."
Anderson says that the first Gulf War was evidence that the United Nations was moving in this direction, and he suggests that, for Habermas, the present age should be seen as one of transition between international law of a traditional kind, regulating relations between states, and a cosmopolitan law establishing individuals as the subjects of universally enforceable rights.
If this is so, then does not the UN lack a mechanism for the resolution of conflicts and the enforcement of individual rights?
Habermas is critical of the nation-state and he sees its power as weakening two broad forces. Anderson says:
"On the one hand, globalization of financial and commodity markets are undermining the capacity of the state to steer socio-economic life: neither tariff walls nor welfare arrangements are of much avail against their pressure. On the other, increasing immigration and the rise of multi-culturalism are dissolving the ethnic homogeneity of the nation. For Habermas, there are grave risks in this two-sided process, as traditional life-worlds, with their own ethical codes and social protections, face disintegration."
This leads to a post-national constellation with the European Union offering a model in which:
"..the powers and protections of different nation-states were transmitted upwards to a supra-national sovereignty that no longer required any common ethnic or linguistic substratum, but derived its legitimacy solely from universalist political norms and the supply of social services. It is the combination of these that defines a set of European values, learnt from painful historical experience, which can offer a moral compass to the Union."
Such a European federation, marks a historic advance beyond the narrow framework of the nation-state. How do we go further than that in terms of a post-national constellation? Certainly not to world government, which is not on the agenda. What we can do is vault the barriers of national sovereignty through human rights.
|
What would a U.N. genuinely responsive to the threat of nuclear annihilation look like? I think Derrida would also suggest the concept of 'human rights' is not so easily pinned down or divorced from its history. As admirable as it may be, are there not some real difficulties with the conception of Habermas's 'universalist' project.