Another Cosmopolitanism

1. Another Cosmopolitanism • Seyla Benhabib • Responses by: • Jeremy Waldron • Bonnie Honig • Will Kymlicka

2. “Philosophical Foundations” • Review the slides for the first chapter. • How can we negotiate the complex relationship between the rights of full membership, democratic voice, and territorial residence?

3. “Democratic Iterations” • Disaggregation of citizenship unbundles collective identity, the privileges of political membership, and the entitlements of social rights and benefits. • Democratic iterations are complex ways of mediating the will-and-opinion-formation of democratic majorities and cosmopolitan norms.

4. “Disaggregation of citizenship in the EU” • The entitlement to rights is no longer dependent on the status of citizenship • We need to anticipate new modalities of political citizenship. • She is proposing an analytic grid for thinking about these transformations.

5. “Democratic Iterations” • Every iteration transforms meaning. • Democratic iterations are linguistic, legal, cultural, and political. • They transform authoritative precedent. (48) • “Productive or creative jurisgenerative politics results in the augmentation of the meaning of rights claims and in the growth of the political authorship by ordinary individuals, who thereby makes these rights their own by democratically deploying them.” (49)

6. Two Examples • “L’Affaire du Foulard” • Her claim is that the wearing of the scarf is resignified. Review her argument. • German citizenship • This example shows that the line between citizens and foreigners can be renegotiated. • Distinguishing the demos from the ethnos (66)

7. “Dialectic of Rights and Identities” • “The presence of others who do not share the dominant culture’s memories and morals poses a challenge to the democratic legislatures to rearticulate the meaning of democratic universalism.” (69) • Only polities with strong democracies are capable of such universalist rearticulation through which they refashion the meaning of their own peoplehood.” (69)

8. “Cosmopolitan Rights and Republican Self-Determination” • (70)To reconcile cosmopolitanism with the unique legal, historical, and cultural traditions of a people requires respect for and encouragement and initiation of multiple processes of democratic iteration. • The authority of cosmopolitan norms comes from the power of democratic forces within global civil society. This soft power may transition into constitutionalization of international law.

9. “Cosmopolitan Rights and Republican Self-Determination” • These norms found a new order, a new normative universe • Local, national, and global are all interconnected and interdependent • This is the emergence of new configurations • It is better to look at it from this perspective than from the perspective of undermining democratic sovereignty.

10. Reply: Jeremy Waldron • He agrees with her concern that cosmopolitanism is about norms and order. • He agrees that it is important to ask about: • Substance—what is the content? (84) • Provenance—what is the authority? (84) • He prefers to begin in the quotidian norms, the more mundane or everyday.

11. Reply: Jeremy Waldron • Substance • “I do not think hospitality is about states or political communities at all, whether at the level of a world republic or an individual republic. It is about relations between people and peoples…” (89) • Emerge through travel, contact, and commerce (90) • Her nationalistic and state-centered reading may present an obstacle for dealings between cultures.

12. Reply: Jeremy Waldron • Provenance • Benhabib rules out natural law and positive law (individual moralizing and commands). • But positive law involves customs and practices. (93) • “A norm’s transformation can be described as democratic, not because a change was approved by people voting as equals, but because the change emerged from the dynamics of ordinary life in relation to which there have been no problematic or invidious exclusions.” (97) • This happens in the lives of ordinary people, with friends and strangers. (Notice the absence of tension here)

13. Benhabib replies • He is wrong about Kant and so wrong about the importance of republics for generating a cosmopolitan spirit. (150) • Free trade is insufficient. • He does not resolve issues about the philosophical status of cosmopolitan norms. Rather, he dissolves these in ordinary practice (155)

14. Reply: Bonnie Honig • Benhabib’s approach retains traces of an earlier universalism (102). • Cosmopolitics would be more helpful. • Paradoxical relationship of conditional and unconditional. • Hospitality is always marked by hostility; cherished ideals contain a trace of what we seek to overcome. (106)

15. Reply: Bonnie Honig • Benhabib sets universality as principle and democratic self-determination as exigency (110) • This promotes a temporal trajectory that seems to assure a positive outcome. (111) • But if we look for the conditional, we know that there is no such promise.

16. Reply: Bonnie Honig • Double gesture • Need to confront and name both the promises and risks. (112) • This will require an agonistic cosmopolitics • Located in the paradox • Claiming a future that may never be (117) • This is not a legalism, but a worldliness and care for the world (120)—yet both can work together.

17. Benhabib replies • Honig fails to recognize the gap between the moral and the political. Benhabib wants to mediate this gap (158) • Because Honig does not see this, she thinks the mediation is really subsumption. • Honig engages in a negative dialectic that is an ideology critique, not an immanent critique.

18. Benhabib replies • Honig comes from a different assessment of institutional power and the potential of transforming it. (163) • Side-stepping the state when considering cosmopolitan norms brings peril with it.

19. Reply: Will Kymlicka • Liberal nationhood is distinguished by tolerance for diversity, yet liberal nationhood has been responsible for grave injuries (130). This can be addressed by: • Taming liberal nationhood • Transcending liberal nationhood

20. Reply: Will Kymlicka • Benhabib wants to claim that processes of transcending liberal nationhood are happening and that these should be normatively endorsed. • His read of the empirical facts is that liberal nationhood is being tamed. This should be encouraged and is best done through multicultural means.

21. Reply: Will Kymlicka • An empirical read of the EU • (135) Those who want to deepen the EU want to give it time to transcend. Those who want to widen it want to allow it to tame. • None of the examples provided by Benhabib reveal a break with the ideology of liberal nationhood. (141) • So, what is happening is a taming, not transcending.

22. Benhabib replies • If Honig has too much anxiety about the liberal democratic nation-state, Kymlicka has too little. (166) • However, she agrees with him on the necessity for public institutions at all levels to be operative in order to achieve cosmopolitan norms. (169)

23. Benhabib replies • Reading the EU points to a devolution of sovereignty, rather than a spreading of liberal nationhood. (170) • Examples of non-national modes of belonging as pointing to trans and supra-national institutions. (172-173) • Importance of considerations of class in multiculturalism.

24. A final note • The danger of the sovereignty of the nation-state being transcended by privatization and corporatization of sovereignty. (177) • Hopeful final note—a cosmopolitanism to come.