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The Dynamics of Citizenship in the Post-Political World

Abstracts for the workshop ”Human Rights and European and Global Citizenship”

 

Making Global Governance Public:  Prospects for a Transnational Public Sphere
Kenneth Baynes (Syracuse University, USA)
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International Human Rights and National Citizenship – First Steps in a Republican Conception of Human Rights
Samantha Besson (University of Fribourg, Swtizerland)
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Empowering the Individual? The Limits of Solidarity and Citizenship beyond the State
David Chandler (University of Westminster, United Kingdom)
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Multilevel Governance as a Challenge to Democratic Ditizenship
Christine Chwaszcza (European University Institute, Italy)
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Unsettling Stakeholders: Deliberative Global Governance and Problems of Democratic Agency
Eva Erman (Stockholm University, Sweden)
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On ”The Turkish Question”: The EU as Exemplar of Post-Political Citizenship
Michael Goodhart (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
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The People from Source to Object of Constitutional Democracy
Sofia Näsström (Stockholm University, Sweden)
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We're All Equal... Because I Said So: Global Citizenship, Elite Activism, and the Need for Global Governance
Christopher L Pallas (London School of Economics, United Kingdom)
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Abstracts

Making Global Governance Public:  Prospects for a Transnational Public Sphere

Author: Kenneth Baynes

This paper will review some of the challenges confronting an accountable and responsive process of governance at the global or transnational level and consider some of the prospects for addressing them.  Central among these prospects is the idea of a transnational public sphere that is able to render global governance more transparent and accountable and that is able to preserve something of Dewey’s notion of a public identification and solution to social (including global) problems.  Proposals for such a public sphere that have been made by Habermas, Joshua Cohen, and Patrizia Nanz and Jeff Steffek will be considered.

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International Human Rights and National Citizenship – First Steps in a Republican Conception of Human Rights

Author: Samantha Besson

(International) human rights theory is en vogue. The main accounts put forward in the last five years are organized across a (self-imposed) divide between so-called ethical or traditional accounts of human rights (Griffin 2008; Tasioulas 2010) and political or functional accounts of human rights (Rawls 1999; Beitz 2009; Raz 2010). Recent attempts have been made to bridge this divide through moral-political accounts of human rights (Cohen 2008; Forst 2010) or, in the field of legal theory, through a moral-legal approach of human rights (Besson 2010). Those proposals share a republican conception of international human rights. In that context, they draw their original inspiration from Arendt’s idea of “the right to have rights” and her argument about political membership.

In this paper, I would like to take a closer look at Arendt’s argument. It is important indeed to assess more precisely how that argument can still be of relevance more than fifty years after she first articulated her challenge to international human rights law and especially after fifty years of steady development and entrenchment of the international human rights practice. I will argue that it can, especially in the context of a republican account of international human rights of the kind developed in the paper. Interestingly, contemporary questions pertaining to the tension between state sovereignty and international human rights find part of their answers in the notion of citizenship whether national or international. It is this relationship between international (or regional) and national human rights, on the one hand, and international (or regional) and national citizenship, on the other, which I purport to explore in light of Arendt’s concept of human rights. In my discussion, I hope to refer to the institutional reality of human rights, but drawing not only on experiences from the international human rights practice, but also from those made in the first post-national
polity, the European Union (EU). More specifically, I will look at the interaction between EU citizenship and EU fundamental rights, and their respective relationship to national citizenship and national human rights.

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Empowering the Individual? The Limits of Solidarity and Citizenship beyond the State

Author: David Chandler

Today there is a widespread recognition of the erosion of political community on the territorial basis of the nation state. Instead, alternative framings of ‘being’ political or of engaging in politics have argued for a more radical post-territorial space of political possibilities, of what it means to be political, and of how we envision political community. Through focusing on the two dominant articulations of post-territorial political community, liberal cosmopolitan and radical poststructuralist approaches, this article seeks to analyse the possibilities and limitations inherent in the search for political community beyond the boundaries of the nation state. The aspiration to engage in, construct, or recognise the existence of a post-territorial political community, a community of broader humanity, has been articulated in liberal terms as cosmopolitanism, driven by global civil society, and in poststructuralist terms as ‘political cosmopolitanism’, ‘cosmopolitanism-to-come’ or the ‘solidarity of the governed’, given its force by the creativity of the resistance to liberal universalism of the ‘multitude’. This article seeks to draw out the similarities between these two contrasting approaches, ostensibly based upon either the extension of or the critique of liberal political ontologies.

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Multilevel Governance as a Challenge to Democratic Citizenship

Author: Christine Chwaszcza

Questions of political legitimacy have a vertical as well as a horizontal dimension. They concern vertical questions concerning the organization of political government and civic obedience on the one hand, as well as horizontal requirements of reciprocity and mutuality that should hold among citizens qua citizens.  The paper will argue that the two dimension are intertwined, insofar as democratic forms of collective decision-making very commonly accept some qualified form of majority rule as a method for settling conflicts of interests and evaluative orientations.  Even though majority rule is usually only one aspect of a more complex systemic arrangement, acceptability of majority rule seems justified only if citizens can reasonably expect that acceptance of it is reciprocally and generally shared by all co-citizens.  Since the only form of evidence that can reasonably support such mutual expectations is public performance, i.e. public particpation of citizens in democratic practices, therefore the dominant forms of multilevel governance, i.e. inter-governmental and/or expertocratic forms of collective decision making, face the problem that they undermine the conditions of acceptability of majority rule.  This paper will explore some directions of change that traditional theories of democratic government may pursue in order to re-adjust the idea of democratic government and the practice of multi-level governance.

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Unsettling Stakeholders: Deliberative Global Governance and Problems of Democratic Agency

Author: Eva Erman

In recent years, we have witnessed deliberative democracy take a ‘civil society turn’ to address the democratic deficit of global governance. In light of the present circumstances of world politics, it is argued that civil society offers a rich soil for reformulating democracy globally since it is inhabited by a growing range of social actors that create new deliberative political spaces, which are more suitable for confronting the globalized political problems that we face today.

This paper engages in the debate on global democracy, with particular focus on democratic agency. It investigates the concept of stakeholder built into this deliberative civil society or stakeholder approach with regard to its democratic qualities. This is done by problematizing a common feature underlying this view, the so-called ‘additive’ premise, which presumes that it is possible to define democracy as a number of core values or qualities and that democracy increases the more these values are strengthened. Popular candidates for core democratic values are accountability, authorization, deliberation, transparency and inclusion. The paper defends the twofold thesis that this stakeholder is not equipped to be a democratic agent insofar as the deliberative civil society view does not fulfil two necessary conditions of democracy, namely, political equality and political bindingness. Further, it is argued that to the extent that we wish to hold on to a deliberative conception of global democracy, Habermas’ discourse theory is still our best bet for accommodating these two conditions, although there is an ambiguity in his principle of democracy which needs to be resolved in order to successfully do so.

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On 'The Turkish Question': The EU as Exemplar of Post-Political Citizenship?

Author: Michael Goodhart

The European Union is often held up as an exemplar of post-political or post-national citizenship.  Many cosmopolitan democrats see the EU as the nascent embodiment of a polity grounded in rights and/or deliberation rather than in the kind of particularistic ties distinctive of national (political) forms of citizenship.  Such a polity is, to them, a model for supranational or global democracy.  This essay reconsiders the idea of the “post-political” through the lens of recent debates about Turkish admission to the Union.  These debates highlight that in important respects, the boundaries of European citizenship, both within and on the geographical periphery of the EU, remain defiantly political.  This, in turn, raises significant questions about the meaning and viability of “post-political” citizenship in Europe and about the appeal of the “post-political” as a guiding analytic concept and normative principle for an era of globalization.   

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The People from Source to Object of Constitutional Democracy
Author: Sofia Näsström

This paper examines the contemporary debate on the scope and nature of “the people”, i.e. the constituent power behind law. It argues that this debate bears witness to a constitutional shift in the literature on global constitutional democracy, a shift that in broad terms can be described as a move from law-making to people-making. More specifically, it makes two claims. First, it shows that the failure to take this shift into account when addressing conflicts on the constituent power of the people leads to the precarious situation of a democratically engendered disenchantment. Second, it argues that in order to resist this move it is necessary to address the conflict on the people in normative terms. Instead of asking who the constituent power is we need to ask what makes it righteous: How do we distinguish legitimate from illegitimate ways of drawing its boundaries?

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We're All Equal... Because I Said So: Global Citizenship, Elite Activism, and the Need for Global Governance

Author: Christopher L. Pallas

States and NGOs working to address issues like climate change, migration, trade, or security claim that the globality of these challenges mandates global solutions.  However, key actors often do more that simply propose new policies: using economic and political leverage or the mechanisms of international institutions, they seek to impose their preferred solutions on other states and populations.  Unlike historic interventions like peace keeping and human rights monitoring, these new interventions are justified not by the need to defend others' rights, but rather by the right of the interveners to protect their own interests or those of the global polity.  In effect, the dialogue surrounding these interventions suggests that all individuals have equally the right and responsibility to act on behalf of the global good.  These claims of global unity, common rights, and universal responsibility reflect a developing principle of global citizenship. 

The problem with this new global citizenship is that historically the rights and responsibilities of citizens are guaranteed and enforced by a state.  At present time there is no global superstate or global government, and many of those global governance institutions that exist manifest profound power imbalances between the populations of rich and poor countries.  Thus while governments and activists may imply that they are acting on a principle of global citizenship, the common rights inherent in such citizenship are not equally accessible to all peoples and the duties involved are not equally enforceable.  European nations can promote global free trade, yet escape African pressure to reduce agricultural subsidies; US NGOs can block World Bank funding for coal-fired power plants, yet developing nations cannot force the US to reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions; other examples abound in areas like fisheries regulation, intellectual property, and immigration policy.

This paper asks whether a spreading belief in global citizenship is a helpful stepping stone to democratic global governance, or if governance must come first for citizenship to have meaning.  In theory, a widespread belief in universal rights and responsibilities could prompt the development of mechanisms to uphold them.  This paper, however, argues that global citizenship, as currently employed, provides moral justification for the actions of powerful actors and that the absence of any enforceable political rights obviates the need for such actors to subject their behavior to others' scrutiny.  Therefore the concept of global citizenship may itself diminish the interest of such actors in democratic global governance.  Thus this paper concludes that claims of global citizenship are premature, and that global citizenship lacks real meaning apart from a democratic system of global governance.

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