|
May 21, 2007
Seyla Benhabib begins her account of cosmopolitanism in Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty, and Democratic Iterations, by noting a tension within the world of liberal democratic cosmopolitanism. In this review of the text Michael Blake says that Benhabib argues:
that we are committed, on the one hand, to cosmopolitan norms of human rights, which seek to articulate a concept of legal rights that are universal and unconditional. We are also, however, committed to a bounded notion of democracy, in which democratic authority is derived from the self-imposed nature of legal norms. This tension, argues Benhabib, is of crucial importance for our political future; the tension between the universal and the particular, the cosmopolitan and the local, requires more serious analysis the more unified and integrated our shared global network of institutions becomes.
The process of mediation Benhabib suggests might be accomplished through the integration of universal cosmopolitan norms into democratic practice. In this, cosmopolitan norms become a part of the local, democratic practice. The universal norms are challenged and given form by the specific challenges of the local (particular) political community, whose self-understanding in turn is adjusted through the application of universal concepts in its political discussions.
This is a powerful argument.
Mediation changes the old nationality versus cosmopolitan duality that still borned this debate. It is the resident alien -- subject to legal authority, and so a a member of the demos, but not part of the community of identification grounding the local community (the ethnos), that leads to to the process of iteration. What is disclosed is cosmopolitan right in the form of hospitality. Benahbib argues that respect must be given both for the democratic life of the people, and the rights of the alien within that people's shared life; severs the tacit linkage between demos and ethnos; displaces the old-fashioned notion of national citizenship, and supersedes the notion of citizenship.
A multicultural Australia has loosened the tight connection between demos and ethnos as we can have demos with a diverse ethnos. What holds the polity together is the democratic values around citizenship
|
