The Boundaries of Citizenship

Western nation-states have developed around liberal conceptions of citizenship. As a consequence, citizenship is associated with a particular legal status that requires members to fulfill a set of legally enforceable requirements. These requirements can include holding a certain amount of money, it may involve active participation as a citizen (i.e. remaining active in communities that one is being naturalised by volunteering, being active in local politics, etc), or being born in a geographic area.

As a citizen with certain rights and obligations you are separated from others who lack the particular distinctive character of your citizenship. While this is, at first, a fairly clear matter that seems uncontroversial, it becomes slightly more complicated should you approach constitutional rights, and the possibility of citizenship, from the framework of critical theory (in particular critical constitutional theory that finds its roots in Habermasian political theory). Omid A. Payrow Shabani has opened a line of dialogue surrounding this issue in his recently published article “Cosmopolitan Justice and Immigration: A Critical Theory Perspective” (Link; leave a comment if you don’t have access to the journal and are interested in the article).

In his article Payrow Shabani argues that immigration law and constitutional law have been kept separate and operate in tension with one another. Liberal democratic constitutions have been developed so to be inclusive – where citizenship is offered on legal, rather than ethnic, grounds it is theoretically possible for anyone to become a citizen. This was essential to overcoming the problem of legitimization, insofar as without an inclusive metric foreign aliens could not participate in lawmaking and thus could not perceive themselves as the authors and addressees of law.

When approaching immigration and citizenship from statist lines, when we evaluate whether the alien accords with legal definitions that have already been established rather than by evaluating their prospects of membership according to tenants of the constitution, we ‘moralise the border’. This involves affirming that “a democratic polity has a one-to-one relationship with a specific geographical territory” (Payrow Shabani, 93). This one-to-one relationship between membership and geography can be overcome by reevaluating constitutional preambles, where instead of asserting ‘We, the people’ as a reference to the present members of a geographic space a universalised (and legally open) signatory is asserted as the document’s author. This openess at the constitutional level would necessitate shifting immigration and citizenship issues to a constitutional level, to the highest level of the nation-state. This legally provides non-citizens with voices, letting them participate in the country they are seeking entry into, and establishes an essential dialogue between present full– and potential-members of the nation-state without denigrating the latter group.

Presently, the boundaries of citizenship are established around geographic territories, divorced from constitutional openness, and resistant to dialogue with foreigners. Let’s turn to the EU to elucidate on why the present method is unappetising and, ultimately, morally reprehensible.

Fortress Europe and British Citizenship Tests

The European Union is often referred to as ‘Fortress Europe’ because of the incredible borders that it is trying to establish to prevent influxes of immigrants. The Medlilla border fence, Ceuta border fence, Lampedusa permanent immigrant camp, not to mention mine fields along the Greek border with Turkey, inhospitable climates of the Sahara, and dangers accompanied with travelling through Chad, Libya, Niger, and Sudan are all aspects of Europe physical fortifications. They are buttressed with harsh illegal immigration laws and increasingly hardened immigration and naturalisation processes.

An element of that hardening can be seen in Britain, where the following proposals are being made:

• Raising visa fees for a special “transitional impact” fund
• More English language testing ahead of nationality
• Requirements to prove integration into communities
• Increasing how long it takes to become British

These modifications will lead to a clearer delimitation of rights, but strong obligations at each stage of the citizenship process to receive those ‘clearer’ rights Moreover, those with children or elderly relatives will be expected to pay higher application fees. (Source)

Closing the Lines of Constitutional Dialogue

What is missing from the British proposals is an openness to the needs of those who have been, or are presently being, exploited by British and EU forces. There is a moral obligation on the part of the West to assist those who are least well off – those worst off are, at the very least in part, in their present socio-economic situations because of the ravages the West has, and continues to, inflict on them. From bi-lateral trade negotiations between the EU towards African nations that effectively undercut a African nations from assuming collective bargaining positions to refusing to purchase foreign commodities unless foreign farmers significantly alter their modes of production, it is clear that the EU and Britain especially have a hand in the global pot. (And this doesn’t even touch on the legacy of colonisation, or a general Rawlsian (i.e. liberal) moral imperative for those best off to assist those who are worst off.)

However, because members of foreign nations cannot participate in dialogue with citizens of Britain on an equal footing when it comes to immigration they are forced to accept changes of UK immigration law without having been heard from. How can they be genuinely expected to integrate into communities when it is evident that the ethnic-political discourse is already working to prevent them from entering the dialogue? How is penalising those who are the worst off supposed to facilitate legal citizenship, where all are seen as equal participants in the legal process, where all have an equal right to voice their concerns? How are the UK’s constitutional conventions expected to prevent the issues of integration and legitimization if their core function of openness to difference is banished?

We live in a world that is becoming more interconnected and the attempts of to fortify and militarize Europe in order to compete in the global economy while simultaneously to accept the responsibilities that accompany the centralisation of global capital within EU borders, threaten to doom the EU. It may not mean an economic failure – it is plausible that EU actions will create a strong enough wall that it will be near impossible for most immigrants to enter the EU while enabling the EU to successfully accumulate global capital. It may ‘thrive’ culturally insofar as it can constantly experience the births of nouveau cultures. What it will find itself without, however, is the moral credibility to enforce the charter of human rights that that has (arguably) guided some of the most substantial and progressive advances in EU law. Substantively enacting that charter requires more than lip service concerning the rights of EU citizens and the injustices that occur past fortress walls – it requires a comprehensive re-evaluation of immigration law and the divorcement of citizenship from strict geographical boundaries.

Other posts you might be interested in:

1. The Digital Workshop and Analogue Drill Presses

Genealogy

There is a tendency to try and capture knowledge in unitary architectures. Foucault equates this to trying to develop a unifying concept to explain the behaviour of each droplet of water that explodes from around a sperm whale when it breeches. In the very process of establishing a complex formula to receive this information, the act itself is lost.

Genealogies draw on localized knowledges and in the process fail to privilege unitary scientific laws wholescale. Localized knowledges draw on ‘subjugated knowledges’, they refer to “historical contents that have been buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systemizations” and to “a whole series of knowledges that have been disqualified as nonconceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naive knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity” (7). Genealogies couple together “scholarly erudition and local memories, which allows us to constitute a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics” (8). In this sense, genealogies act as anti-sciences – they draw attention to the cracks that science ignores, to point to these holes to reveal the truth of science’s unitary discourse: science is neither omniscient or entirely extensive.

In reactivating local knowledges the unitary truths that science has established must be questioned – they must demonstrate their validity in the face of open criticism. While there might seem to be a danger, that in revealing and using ‘minor’ or local knowledges that the unitary discourse may attempt to colonize the genealogical conclusions, this has not (evidently) happened thus far. Anti-psychoanalysis has not been absorbed by scientific discourse – there has been relatively little/no discourse whatsoever about it in the scientific community. While this lack of discussion could be read as science being fearful of local knowledges, a more cautious response would assume that science is not concerned with anti-sciences – local knowledges remain marginalized and, as such, cannot effectively reveal the incoherent groundings for scientific power in a way that would significantly realign social norms/power structures.

Foucault identifies two dominant ways of looking at power at this stage of his writings, which are eloquently captured when he states;

Broadly speaking, we have, if you like, in one case a political power which finds its formal model in the process of exchange, in the economy of circulation of goods; and in the other case, political power find its historical raison d’etre, the principle of its concrete form and of its actual workings in the economy (14).

His statement nicely aligns with power distinctions in classical liberal theory and Marxist theories – the contract that sees power as a commodity, or as a relationship that grounds the economy, whereas the other sees politics and political power rising out of the economy. From these situations we can analyze power either according to power-contracts or by contract-oppression schemas. We are invariably led to a repression-war schema that may be played out through politics and science that operates using the domineering discourses that ‘peacefully’ order society. Genealogies, with their local knowledges, threaten these peaceful orders by injecting resistance to unities and, in the process, resist normative social order.

The Internet

Blogs, wikis, and other localized digital content creation systems threaten the unitary discourse of science. While many of these personal projects effectively reinforce the dominant metric (by unconsciously affirming norms, and rejecting ‘deviant’ positions) there is the possibility to record, examine, and relate to other local knowledges. This means that the dominating scientific truths concerning 9/11 can be challenged atomistically (a single person making a single assertion) as well as molecularly (a series of people can make a series of interlinked assertions). Overcoding this, however, is the fact that most users are limited by the digitial norms (or laws) that are imposed on them by the software they are using – for all the insistences of open-source software, most users cannot reprogram their tools to deviate from the norms/laws that bind their digital interactions.

While the Internet, with its localized knowledges and mass appeal, appears to provide a way of breaking through to others, we should now turn to reasons why this may be inaccurate or ineffective.

Centralized National Power and Repression

In Who Controls the Internet? Goldsmith and Wu provide a series of reasons why the 90s dreams of the ‘net being a euphoric zone of resistance were overly optimistic. In particular, while the nation-state is less able to retain and distribute all power and force across the state, it can still limit content by exercising coercive force to prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from delivering content – it can actively try to prevent citizens from ever receiving local knowledges that could invoke resistance movements. This is an act of repression, where within the nation-state’s pseudo-peace a continuous war persists, a perpetual relationship of force. Even in these relationships, however, force has its limits.

By masking local knowledges in knowledges affirming national norms the unitary and local knowledges are ‘mixed’, limiting the nation-state’s ability to effectively limit knowledges to those validated by a unitary norm. At issue is that this means that modes of resistance would be weakened in areas where governments have less to fear from limiting popular communications – only where free speech, or other open cultural practices are valued can digital mixing be successful.

A concern arising from this is that, if we view the nation-state in this sense, what would a cosmopolitan that attempted to respect the plurality of members resemble? While Foucault paints a picture of the terrible nation-state, I wonder what his formulation of the state would be when examining societies that operate according to a shared, increasingly inclusive, and plastic ethical-political culture, where the dominant social groups norms are not the driving force of national culture. While repression would inevitably continue in some fashions (the nature of the constitution when it is understood as a bordering device demands this) I can’t help but wonder whether or not in this environment local knowledges would increasingly bubble through the cracks of science, dissolving many of its less cohesive bonds.

Other posts you might be interested in:

1. Analyzing the Verizon-Google Net Neutrality Framework
2. Boost Up Your Net With ISP Injections
3. Three-Strikes to Banish Europeans and Americans from the ‘net?

Obligatory exclusivity thesis: A state’s foreign policy always ought to be determined exclusively by the national interest. (110)

Based on OET, national policy guides all foreign actions – this means that human rights are of no consequence to a nation that does regard human rights as an element of their national interest. That said, such an extreme position would commit anyone holding it to a pretty tight corner. In light of this, Buchanan suggests another formulation of the OET that allows us to at least consider rights. The weakened thesis is called the Permissible Exclusivity Test:

Permissible exclusivity thesis: It is always permissible for a state’s foreign policy to be determined exclusively by the national interest. If a state chooses, it may subordinate all other values to the pursuit of the national interest in any case. (111)

We focus on PET, even then OET is held by many political leaders, for two reasons:

1. It is less demanding and therefore should be easier to justify than the OET;
2. If we show that the PET is indefensible it will count as a count again OET.

Attempts to Justify the Permissible Exclusivity Test

The PET doesn’t take a particular position on what the national interest is, which means that we cannot assume that the national interest bears resemblance to the national interests in North America – it could resemble the interests of any nation, any morality, or any culture. We have no guarantee that by adhering to PET that nations will consequently adopt human rights – this principle asserts that it is permissible to do anything in foreign politics on the basis that it is motivated by national interests. Moreover, this assertion draws a close correlation between national and foreign interests – the principle assumes that there is always a close relation between the two. While there are many such relations, it cannot be said that all foreign policy decisions are motivated by the national interest. Moreover, this thesis would make it morally permissible for a large militaristic nation to launch wars against far weaker, passive countries solely on the basis of the national interest – this is an extremely unappealing view of the PET, and we now turn to several ways of justifying it and defending it from these critiques.

The Fiduciary Realist Justification for Permissible Exclusivity

Fiduciary Realism holds that the overriding moral obligation of state leaders is to maximize the national interest. Fiduciaries are expected to always act for the betterment of the national interest – their duty requires them to orient all foreign policy in line with the national interest and to ignore their own moral directions. In essence, they are to become automatons, figures that act solely for the state and for nothing else. In addition to this the state, and her agents, are supposed to exist in a realist situation – realism here should be read as ‘Hobbesian’. Under this system a series of international conditions exist:

1. There is no global sovereign that can enforce rules of peaceful cooperation;
2. All states are approximately equal in power to one another;
3. States are primarily concerned with their own survival;
4. Given the above conditions, the most rational thing for a state to do is to try to subjugate others to avoid being subjugated;
5. In this situation, where all are trying to dominate each other, moral rules are inapplicable. (114)

This environment presupposes that the base and final position of nation-states is one of violence – the only real goal of foreign policy is to sustain the state through military might. Instead of directly refuting this position Buchanan uses a series of minor examples to demonstrate that Hobbesian realists must justify their position – it is not his own task to refute the position until an adequate defence is given of it.

To begin, nations do cooperate with one another in areas where military security is not a concern – examples can be seen by looking at relationships built on cultural exchange, peaceful sharings of technologies, or to learn and explore for the sake of learning and exploring. Historically more economically powerful nations were able to take risks by engaging in these kinds of relationships, but as information technologies develop, and global communications become increasingly common, lines of trust are developed. Bonds are formed that are not militarily strategic. Moreover, the strict correlation between national interests and survivalism suggests that the attitudes of nations are fixed, and in doing so ignores the plastic quality of states that are influenced by corporations, NGOs, other governments, and their own citizenry, not to mention ‘non-intelligent’ factors such as the environment.

Another flaw in the fiduciary realist justification is that it maintains that “pursing an additional increment of benefit for a nation that is already exceptionally rich and already enjoys excellent protection of human rights always should have priority over every other end, including making great improvement in the well-being of the world’s worst off people” (116). A defender of fiduciary realism might insist that leaders’ correct roles, morally speaking, are to promote the state. As an agent in the state of nature, leaders cannot let themselves be distracted by the temptations of morality – it does not exist in the domain for foreign policy because no sovereign can legitimately enforce rules of peaceful cooperation.

With this in mind, we need to approach a fundamental question: Is the state an association that exists for the sole benefit of citizens? Or should it be recognized as a resource for benefiting its own citizens and others by grounding its actions and judgements on human rights. If human rights act as a common ground, then it remains possible for independent nations to focus on particular interests for their people on the basis that some local needs are best understood and served by local (i.e. national) government. For the Hobbesian realist, however, it is impossible to reach the point where human rights can operate this way – by asserting the existence of a state of nature cooperative common moral norms can never arise, let alone be championed.

The Instrumental Justification for Permissible Exclusivity

This mode of justification aims to show that “even though there are human rights, it is permissible for foreign policy to be determined exclusively by what best promotes the national interest concedes that although the national interest is not the supreme moral value, conditions in international relations are such that those who conduct foreign policy should act as if it is” (118). Ultimately, this is a market-style approach for justifying PET – if all individuals are rational agents who are mutually self-interested, and genuinely are equal, then their combined behaviour will have the same effects as though a global morality guided all national actions. The burden lays on those who would justify this position, not with Buchanan, or us, to justify it for them so that we can knock it down again.

The most innovative defendant of this justification is Hans Morgenthau, who argues that we must assume that actors will behave this way, and that morality should not be the directing force for politics on the basis that it could lead to moral colonialism. Morgenthau appears to have two central (though undisclosed) premises in his argument:

1. Each society has its own notion of morality that is incompatible with other notions;
2. If a state lets morality guide its actions it will eschew tolerance in an attempt to enforce its views on other nations. (119)

(1) fails to recognize that most moral systems are generally aimed at establishing a peaceful means of co-existing and, as such, seems to miss a critical point of common contact between moral systems. It also (foolishly) supposes that morality can be effectively disengaged from national actions; (2) Is somewhat extreme, and also supposes that morality would be the common rail that would guide international relations. Human rights, within an institutional framework and justified according to legal norms, offer a means of guiding international actions without allowing for moral imperialism. Human rights prevent aggressive wars, and mitigate imperialism by inhibiting powerful nations’ abilities to act on people across the world. Establishing a legal structure offers a way of mediating moral conflicts by establishing a way for punitively treating nations that do act as moral imperialists. In light of these reasons, we cannot accept Morgenthau’s defence of the Instrumental Justification.

Explaining the Popularity of the Permissible Exclusivity Thesis

The PET is extremely well liked because it is simple, draws on historical prejudices, and allows leaders to exploit nationalistic hatreds. Moreover, there is an assumed dichotomy between PET and utopianism. This distinction, however, compresses the ideal and non-ideal moral views into a utopian perspective. To be more clear, the ideal theory focuses on the principles that a just world would conform to, whereas non-ideal theory attempts to determine how to move towards the ideal situation. The non-ideal and ideal situation can both allow for attention being given to national interests; the world is not necessarily ‘smoothed’ by either of these theories. Since we lack a world government, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the will be a moral division of work.

Ultimately, once we are free from necessarily looking at the national interest we can adjust our attention to how ‘domestic’ policies are shaped by, and shape, other governments and citizens, and vice versa.

I would take slightly different tacks than Buccanan at several points – to begin, I’d have made a distinction between morality and ethics to clarify and rebut justifications of PET. Moreover, I think that his current estimation of human rights fails to recognize that (a) there are governments that had no time in crafting them; (b) there are governments that flagrantly ignore them; (c) that even with human rights, Darfur continues. He need to work harder to give a reason for why we should see human rights as something genuinely worth considering. I recognize that his central aim is to dissolve the belief that a nation can be directed by national interest and hold human rights in high regard, but there isn’t a solid reason for accepting the value of human rights here, save for at an instrumental level. I would have appreciated it if he had at least tried to appeal to something like (U) to justify them, though for space reasons and perhaps lack of familiarity with Habermas it wasn’t included.

Other posts you might be interested in:

1. Review of “National Identities and Communications Technologies” by Mark Poster
2. Review of “A cosmopolitan perspective on the global economic order” by Thoman Pogge
3. Review: Network Nation – Inventing American Telecommunications

1. That he is making a conceptual mistake by re-labelling actions harmful that are really failures to aid and protect.
2. That he is factually wrong about the causal explanations of severe poverty.
3. That he is morally wrong by presenting minimal requirements that are excessively demanding.

In addressing these issues, Pogge adopts a ecumenical approach – his approach is intended to convince adherents of all the major moral theories that his position is defensible from all of their objections. Moreover, by adopting a multiplicity of divergent lines of argumentative defence, Pogge aims to avoid creating a strategy that can be ignored by theorists on the basis that they hold hold contrary philosophical positions. Specifically, he will be addressing Lockeans, Libertarians, Rawlsians, and communitarians.

Before addressing any of these topics, we must first clarify and distinguish between positive and negative duties. Positive duties assert that we must do something – we might have a positive duty to help old ladies across the street – whereas negative duties assert that we must not do something – we must not injure or steal from another person. In addition to these kinds of duties, Pogge identifies intermediate duties, which are what he is really referring to when talking about negative duties. These duties are positive, insofar as we are required to adopt them, but must be adopted because of the negative consequence that would follow from not adopting them. While Pogge is dominantly discussing intermediate and negative duties, he isn’t doing this because he sees them as more important than positive duties – he simply assumes that “negative and intermediate duties are more stringent than positive duties when what is at stake for all concerned is held constant (Pogge 94).

Engaging Historical Conceptions of Social Justice
There is a very prominent group of theorists who argue that even though inequality is obviously prevalent in the world, there is no obvious duty to alleviate the inequality. Their argument goes as such: It is possible that even if colonialism did not occur, and Europeans had not stripped resources from Africa, that Europe could have flourished and Africa degenerated to its current state. Based on this possibility there is not a necessary negative or intermediate duty to alleviate the inequality as it exists today.

Pogge responds by turning to an equally fictional account of history, and uses it to demonstrate that theorists who refute their duty on the basis of a fictional history are not adequately or convincingly engaging with their pre-political theoretical roots. In Locke’s state of nature individuals can collect property so long as their collection does not cause other people’s deaths – even in the state of nature there is an obligation to assist others when they fall below the level of sustenance, especially if their fall is directly related to the collection of properties. In turning to Locke, Pogge argues that we can see him advocating a kind of claims-rights; individuals have a claim to subsistence.

“[W]e affluent have no right to property, however acquired, in the face of the excluded. Rather, they have a right to what we hold. When we prevent them from exercising this right – when we deprive them of what is justly theirs – then we violate this original right of the poor and we harm them. In this way it is a good violation of a negative duty to deprive others of “enough and as good” – either through unilateral appropriations or through institutional arrangements such as radically inegalitarian property regime (Pogge, 99)

I would note that I strongly object to Pogge’s notion that Locke is dominantly referring to claims-rights; instead I see Locke as asserting there is a negative duty to avoid illegitimately hindering other citizens’ (or, more generally in the state of nature, humans’) liberty on the basis that such limitations contradict the state of nature’s laws. If interested, I can discuss this at length and draw from papers I have presented on the subject and a short essay I have written on the topic.

Engaging Broadly Consequentialist Conceptions of Social Justice
Pogge notes that not many moral theorists hold the aforementioned views concerning fictional histories. . Instead, they “hold that an economic order and the economic distribution it shapes should be assessed by its foreseeable efforts against the background of its feasible alternative” (Pogge, 100). There are many consequentialist models that approach this issue, though their conceptions generally differ along three dimensions:

1. They differently characterize the relevant affected parties;
2. They differ about metric for assessing relevant efforts;
3. They differ about how to aggregate relevant effects across the affected parties.

Most consequentialist theorists broadly agree that national economic orders are unjust if they leave social and economic human rights unfulfilled on a massive scale. Extending this to a broader sphere, the affluent are harming the global poor by imposing unjust social institutions upon them – the consequential connection between harm and justice at the national level demands a similar attitude be taken up in addressing harm and injustice internationally.

This ultimately means that Pogge must try to implement a human right to basic necessities, and this involves three separate steps. Step one is briefly outlined below, Pogge cannot adequately address two in his small paper, and so we will continue this thread by turning to the third element of his argument after listing them.

1. We must show that it is a minimal and widely acceptable demand of justice on all national institutional schemes that they are designed to avoid life-threatening poverty as far as is possible;
   • No real consequentialist position holds this – the closest defendant would be Nozzick, though his appeal to a fictional situation to justify inequality was deal with earlier in this post where not even Locke consents to the fictions egalitarians purport
2. We must show that this demand for justice applies beyond the national to the global level;
3. We must show that there are feasible options to alleviating global poverty.

There is a pattern that many economists and other consequentialists hold. They assert that the problems that are identified at the national level must be resolved to alleviate global poverty, and until national parties can reduce their internal corruption that there is no duty to try and assist them in (a believed to be) hopeless endeavour. What such attitudes mask or ignore is that causal global factors significantly influence national patterns – the actions taken nationally by leaders in the first world have a significant affect on how impoverished nations in the third can meet and deal with their impoverishment. Pogge’s proposed “feasible alternative” is for first world nations to institute the global resources dividend (GRD). This would tax all capital transactions by one percent and then allocate that one percent to the impoverished nations. This shouldn’t be regarded as aid but as a just allocation of wealth in line with Lockean claim-rights; the impoverished would receive the share of the world’s property that they require (must claim) to meet their basic survival needs.

Pogge recognizes that such a distribution system will never be perfect – some of the money will be rerouted illegally, but he doesn’t see this as a justifiable reason to not implement the GRD. What I see as perhaps more concerning is that: (a) Pogge’s argument significantly leans on claim-rights, which may not be as easily demonstrated in Locke as he suggests; (b) while he establishes the moral need to assist the impoverished, he doesn’t recognize that his conception of moral need may be similar to the duty to assist others that was seen during colonialism. To explain, while he argues that one percent of all capital transactions should be returned to impoverished nations, he assumes that percentage return is just. Admittedly, he foresees this potential issue when discussing the problems consequentialists may have with his proposals, but I don’t think that he adequately addresses the matter. (c) Finally, and again turning to Locke, Locke doesn’t ‘end’ his theory in the state of nature but brings it into civil society and develops a comprehensive account of justice. Where is Pogge’s explication of that development, and how does it correlate into his account of just distribution? While he claims to only be appropriating elements of Locke’s state of nature, he is injecting those elements into a semi-structured international political sphere that (arguably) diverges from a state of nature. Without this kind of explication I am left questioning whether or not Pogge really offers an ecumenical approach that successfully addresses his critics.

Other posts you might be interested in:

1. “Principles of cosmopolitan order” by David Held
2. Global Privacy and the Particular Body Politic
3. Review of “In the national interest” by Allen Buchanan

Held begins his article in Brock’s and Brighouse’s The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism by differentiating between cosmopolitanism that shifts from the polis to the cosmos, and the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitan attitude of maturity and reflexivity. The former insists that individuals’ first allegiance is to humanity rather than the community, whereas for the latter cosmopolitan right “meant the capacity to present oneself and be heard within and across political communities; it was the right to enter dialogue without artificial constraint and delimitation” (11).

Held’s article is subsequently divided into four sections. The first identifies cosmopolitan principles, the second distinguishes between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ cosmopolitanism, the third justifies cosmopolitan claims, and the fourth section sketches how to transition from justifications to law. The ultimate aim is to understand the aim and scope of cosmopolitanism.

Cosmopolitan Principles

Held identifies eight cosmopolitan principles – they are listed with brief explanations.

Cluster (1) – (3) sets the “fundamental organizational features of the cosmopolitan moral universe” (15).

Cluster (4) – (6) establishes the guidelines that must be met if public power is to be seen as legitimate across all spectrums of life.

Clusters (7) and (8) establish the cosmopolitan’s moral framework and prudential orientation, respectively.

(1) Equal worth and dignity

• All humans belong to a single moral realm and as such they should (morally) be treated as having the same worth and dignity as all other humans.

(2) Active Agency

• All humans have the ability to reason self-consciously, be self-reflective, and be self-determining. (This is significantly drawn from Enlightenment’s ideal of maturity though, as will be seen, lacks the monological twist that Kant’s notion of maturity had while avoiding the Hegelian totalization of reason.)

(3) Personal responsibility and accountability

• This principle supplements principles (1) and (2) – it acknowledges that agents must be aware of, and accountable for, the consequences of their actions, regardless of whether the consequences are direct, indirect, meditated, or accidental.

(4) Consent

• People’s lives are interlocked. As a result, those that are affected by a process must be able to participate in the discourse without fear of unjustified coercion.

(5) Collective decision-making about public matters through voting procedures

• Voting is used as the way of generating consent because, if genuine consent of all were required, then minorities could prevent public responses to critical issues.

(6) Inclusiveness and solidarity

• Those that would be affected by a decision should have an equal opportunity to shape the decision that is reached.

(7) Avoidance of serious harm

• In the cases of finite resources, situations must be prioritized and the most critical first attended to. While this will leave some situations unresolved because of inadequate resources, if this principle guides political action it stands to reason that there will be fewer and fewer instances where situations are so severe that they gain moral priority.

(8) Sustainability

• Before engaging in actions it is important to consider their future effects – we live in an age when our actions could forever reshape the lives of our children, which means we ought to be conservative in the actions that we take.

Thick or Thin Cosmopolitanism?

Thick Cosmopolitanism – Insists that special attention to any particular person or group must be in accordance with universalistic principles that include all of humanity.

Thin Cosmopolitanism – While a greater attachment may be felt towards some people, such attachment is only one of many spheres of moral responsibility to others.

Held himself argues for a layered (i.e. thin) cosmopolitanism that tries to maintain ethical neutrality by not privileging a particular good-life over any other. This neutrality doesn’t suggest that there are no ethics, or that they are necessarily equal to one another, just that his procedural account leaves political environments open for individuals to freely pursue their notions of the good so long as they do not harm others.

Cosmopolitan justification

There are two important distinctions to make: Questions about the principles’ origins and their validity. The justificatory rationale between cosmopolitan principles depends on the metaprinciple of autonomy (which is cultural and historical) and the metaprinciple of impartialist reasoning (which is philosophical).

Metaprinciple of Autonomy (MPA)

There are deep roots for this principle in history – autonomy was valued in Greece and Rome, but its contemporary realization emerged with the Enlightenment. While there have been different understandings of what autonomy is, the general aim has always been towards egalitarian principles, of democratic regulation of public life, and that individuals’ interests in self-determination or self-governance be protected (20). In essence, the MPA is the guiding thread that has motivated democracies around the world. While some may argue that Held’s position prefigures a commitment towards the MPA that ignores divergent cultural values, he returns that this value is shared across Western and non-Western cultures. Non-Western cultures demand protection of language on the basis of their equal status or worth when compared to Western cultures – this alone belies the fact that these other cultures value the leading tenants of the MPA.

Metaprinciple of Impartialist Reasoning (MPIR)

The MPIR “is a moral frame of reference for specifying rules and principles that can be universally shared; and, concomitantly, it rejects as unjust all those practices, rules, and institutions anchored in principles not all could adopt” (22). Rather than acting as a way of establishing particular principles the MPIR calls for adopting norms such as Rawls’ Original Position, Habermas’ ideal speech situation, and Barry’s formulation of impartialist reasoning (21). This lets the MPIR act heuristically, to evaluate actual principles for their moral worth and, when they are found invalid, justifies discarding them. In this way, it operates similarly to Habermas’ principle of universalization. By adopting a method of impartialist reasoning it becomes possible to divide matters of the good from those of the right, enabling conversations to focus on the validity of arguments, rather than their worth.

From Cosmopolitan Principles to Cosmopolitan Law

Principles (1) – (8) are more expansive than Kant’s limited right to hospitality – the cosmopolitan right that Held is engaging with subordinates regional, national, and local sovereignties to trans-regional, -national, and -local sovereignties. In the system he outlines, because citizens are caught in a plurality of diverse conditions and sovereignties, many of which are outside of the scope of their current memberships, citizenship should be reassessed as including everyone in a sphere that affects them. Hence, a citizen of France that is being affected by the pollution of Chernobyl would also be a (limited?) citizen of the Ukraine.

While Held doesn’t suggest this, perhaps a more satisfying conclusion would be the discarding of traditional citizenships, and recognizing citizenship according to issues such as particular environmental issues, outbreaks of violence, et cetera. In this situation the nation-state, enmeshed in a network of conflicts, would be responsible for applying coercion but not be responsible for actually pronouncing a verdict – the citizen-group that was affected would have to be the authors and addressees of any law that the nation levelled. This would create a nightmare of a political situation – I don’t know how to fit the nation into this kind of a framework, though it might be interesting to explore later.

Other posts you might be interested in:

1. Review of “A cosmopolitan perspective on the global economic order” by Thoman Pogge