Dignity in Adversity

Human Rights in Troubled Times

Seyla Benhabib

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745659718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The language of human rights has become the public vocabulary of our contemporary world. Ironically, as the political influence of human rights has grown, their philosophical justification has become ever more controversial.

Building on a theory of discourse ethics and communicative rationality, this book addresses the politics and philosophy of human rights against the background of the broader social transformations that are shaping the modern world. Rejecting the reduction of international human rights to the Trojan horse of a neo-liberal empire's bid for world power, as well as the conservative objections to legal cosmopolitanism as encroachments upon democratic sovereignty, Benhabib develops two key concepts to move beyond these false antitheses. International human rights norms need contextualization in specific polities through processes of what she calls 'democratic iterations.' Furthermore, such norms have a 'jurisgenerative power, ' in that they enable new actors to enter fields of social and political contestation; they promote new vocabularies for public claim-making and anticipate a justice to come.

Ranging over themes such as sovereignty, citizenship, genocide, European anti-semitism, the crisis of the nation-state, and the 'scarf affair' in contemporary Europe and Turkey, this major new book by one of our leading political theorists reflects upon the political transformations of our times and makes a compelling case for a cosmopolitanism without illusions.

1

INTRODUCTION

Cosmopolitanism without Illusions

Cosmopolitans and Dead Souls

In the spring of 2004, the far-seeing even if irritating political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published “Dead Souls. The Denationalization of the American Elite.”¹ Huntington, who only a decade earlier had created the famous phrase, “the clash of civilizations,” resorted in this 2004 essay to attaching another memorable image to an argument. He quotes from Walter Scott’s “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”: “Breathes there the man with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said:/ ‘This is my own, my native Land?’/Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned/As home his footsteps he hath turned … /From wandering on a foreign strand?”²

Yes, answers Huntington; the number of “dead souls” is growing “among America’s business, professional, intellectual and academic elites.” Some of these elites are universalists, who take American nationalism and exceptionalism to the extreme and who want to spread democracy across the world because America is the “universal nation” (6). Others are economic elites who see globalization as a transcendent force that is breaking down national boundaries and giving rise to a new civitas maxima in the shape of the global market. Still a third group of dead souls, in Huntington’s view, are moralists who deride patriotism and nationalism and argue that “international law, institutions, regimes and norms are morally superior to those of individual nations” (6). In contrast, for most ordinary citizens of most states, he argues, nationalism is a potent force that still lights fire in their hearts and makes them feel happy to return home, from “wandering on a foreign strand.”

Are cosmopolitans dead souls, then? Is cosmopolitanism the privileged attitude of globe-trotting and world-hugging elites, removed from the concerns of ordinary citizens?

The essays collected in this volume contend that “cosmopolitanism” denotes no such privileged attitude but rather, a field of unresolved contrasts: between particularistic attachments and universalist aspirations; between the multiplicity of human laws and the ideal of a rational order that would be common to all human cities; and between belief in the unity of humankind and the healthy agonisms and antagonisms generated by human diversity.

Cosmopolitans become dead souls only if they forget these tensions and contrasts and embrace instead a Polyannaish, ceaseless affirmation of global oneness and unity. As David J. Depew wisely observes, “Cosmopolitanism, then, considered as a positive ideal, whether formally or materially, generates antinomies that undermine its internal coherence … Considered, however, as a critical ideal, these difficulties largely disappear. The resulting conception of cosmopolitanism [is] a negative ideal aimed at blocking false totalization.”³

Pursuing this conception of cosmopolitanism as a critical and, in some ways, “a negative ideal aimed at blocking false totalization,” the following essays explore the tensions at the heart of this project. I focus on the unity and diversity of human rights; on the conflicts between democracy and cosmopolitanism; on the vision of a world with porous borders and the closure required by democratic sovereignty. That I choose the term cosmopolitanism to carry out such a project may surprise some. Until recently, the term lay buried in the study of ideas of the eighteenth century; by the nineteenth-century, historians were already struggling with the rise of nationalism. Cosmopolitanism seemed a forgotten expression of a discredited European and North American Enlightenment.⁴

The last two decades have seen a remarkable revival of interest in cosmopolitanism across a wide variety of fields, ranging from law to cultural studies, from philosophy to international politics, and even to city planning and urban studies.⁵ Undoubtedly, the most important reason for this shift in our sensibilities and cognitions is the confluence of epoch-making transformations, referred to as “globalization” and the end of the “Westphalian-Keynesian-Fordist” paradigm by many;⁶ as the spread of neo-liberal capitalism by some; and as the rise of multiculturalism and the displacement of the West by still others. Cosmopolitanism has become a place-holder for thinking beyond the confusing present towards a possible and viable future. Pheng Cheah characterizes this present in the following words:

What is distinctively new about the revival of cosmopolitanism that began in the 1990’s is the attempt to ground the normative critique of nationalism in analyses of contemporary globalization and its effects. Hence, studies of various global phenomena such as transcultural encounters, mass migration and population transfers between East and West, First and Third Worlds, North and South, the rise of global financial and business networks, the formation of transnational advocacy networks, and the proliferation of transnational human rights instruments have been used to corroborate the general argument that globalizing processes, both past and present, objectively embody different forms of normative, non-ethnocentric cosmopolitanism because they rearticulate, radically transform, and even explode the boundaries of regional and national consciousness and local ethnic identities.⁷

In view of these contradictory tensions, the term “cosmopolitanism” when it suggests a positive normativity, becomes at once seductive and deeply problematic.⁸ It may seem as if merely invoking the forces which “explode the boundaries of regional and national consciousness and local ethnic identities” (Cheah) is sufficient to transcend them toward a cosmopolitan ideal whose own content is indeterminate. It clearly is not.

Nevertheless, I wish to argue that, as misleading as the project of cosmopolitanism may be in some of its formulations, it needs to be saved both from its nationalist-communitarian critics on the right and its cynical detractors on the left,⁹ no less than from its postmodernist and deconstructionist skeptics. Caught between the nostalgia for communities unriven by difference and the cynicism that reduces cosmopolitanism to a bid for imperial domination, much contemporary thought misses what is new in the development of a cosmopolitan human rights discourse.¹⁰

To appreciate the depth and tenacity of these tensions it is important to explore briefly some themes which have been historically associated with cosmopolitanism.

A Brief History

The term cosmopolites is composed of kosmos (the universe) and polites (citizen). And the tension between these perspectives is significant.¹¹ Montaigne recalls that Socrates was asked:

where he came from. He replied not “Athens,” but “the world.” He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city, and distributed his knowledge, his company, and his affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot.¹²

Whether or not Socrates said anything of this kind is in dispute, but the story is repeated by Cicero in Tusculum Disputationes, by Epictetus in his Discourses, and by Plutarch in De Exilio, where he praises Socrates for saying that “he was no Athenian or Greek, but a Cosmian.”¹³

What does it mean to be a Cosmian? To live outside the boundaries of the city, according to Aristotle, one needed to be either a beast or a god, but since men were neither and since the kosmos was not the polis, the kosmopolites was not really a citizen at all but some other kind of being.

To Cynics such as Diogenes Laertius this conclusion was not particularly disturbing, since he claimed that rather than being at home in the city, the cosmopolitan was indifferent to them all. The kosmopolites was a nomad without a home, at peace with nature and the universe but not with the human city, from whose follies he distanced himself. Some of the negative connotations of the term which we have become familiar with in modern history, such as “rootless cosmopolitanism,” also alluded to by Huntington, have their roots in this early period of the history of cosmopolitanism, during which the ancient Cynics’ opposition to and contempt for the practices of various human cities originates.

The negative vision of cosmopolitanism as a form of nomadism without attachments to a particular human city, as espoused by the Cynics, is transformed by the Stoics. By drawing attention to the absurd and incompatible plurality of human nomoi – the laws of their individual cities – Stoics argue that what humans share is not in the first place their nomoi, but logos, that in virtue of which they are capable of reason. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes:

If we have intelligence in common, so we have reason (logos) … If so, then the law is also common to us and, if so, we are citizens. If so we share a common government. And if so, the universe is, as it were, a city.¹⁴

In the centuries that follow, the idea of an order that transcends differences among the laws of various cities, and is rooted instead in the rationally comprehensible structure of nature, converges with the Christian doctrine of universal equality.¹⁵ The Stoic doctrine of natural law inspires the Christian ideal of the city of God versus the city of men, and eventually finds its way into the modern natural law theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant.

The negative and positive dimensions of kosmopolites, which we first encounter in Greek and Roman thought, accompany the term across the centuries: a kosmopolites is one who distances himself either in thought or in practice from the habits and laws of his city and judges them from the standpoint of a higher order, often considered to be identical with reason, with nature or with some other transcendent source of validity. And because the cosmopolitan entertains a perspective that transcends the city and its ordinary human attachments, s/he is the object of suspicion and resentment by those who love their cities.

These tensions between citizenship in a bounded community and cosmopolitanism are transformed when Kant, at the end of the eighteenth century, resuscitates the Stoic meaning of cosmopolitanism by giving the term a new turn that places it at the heart of the Enlightenment project. It is also with Kant that the term “cosmopolitan” is transformed from a denial of citizenship into that of “citizenship of the world,” and is linked to a new conception of human rights as cosmopolitan rights. Hence, to understand why, even under current world conditions, cosmopolitanism offers itself as a positive but potentially false normativity – or, in my preferred terminology, “as a negative ideal aimed at blocking false totalization” – we have to turn briefly to Kant but also to move beyond Kant. Let me explain this double move of going back to Kant and yet moving away from him.

Despite its ambiguous links to Western imperialist expansion, Kant’s vision of cosmopolitanism is valuable for the space it creates for conceptualizing international law beyond the state as a juridical order that would encompass non-state actors, as well as individuals. Kant’s conceptual initiative culminates later in international human rights law, developed particularly after 1948. These transformations do not resolve or dissolve the normative ambiguities of cosmopolitanism, but they enable the emergence of a space of “jurisgenerativity” for thinking through the unity and diversity of human rights across borders.

Kant’s Transformation of Cosmopolitanism

In his famous 1795 essay on “Perpetual Peace,” Kant formulated three “definitive articles.” These read: “The Civil Constitution of Every State shall be Republican”; “International Right shall be based on the Federalism of Free States”; and “The Law of World Citizenship Shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.”¹⁶

Kant himself designates the Third Article of perpetual peace with the term of “Weltbürgerrecht.” “Das Weltbürgerrecht soll auf Bedingungen der allgemeinen Hospitalität eingeschränkt sein”; “Cosmopolitan Right shall be limited to the conditions of universal hospitality” (Kant [1795] 1923: 443, 2006: 82). As I have argued elsewhere, Kant himself notes the oddity of the locution “hospitality” in this context, and remarks that “it is not a question of philanthropy but of right.”¹⁷ In other words, hospitality is not to be understood as a virtue of sociability, as the kindness and generosity one may show to strangers who come to one’s land or who become dependent upon one’s act of kindness through circumstances of nature or history; rather, hospitality is a right which belongs to all human beings insofar as we view them as potential participants in a world republic.

Kant writes:

Hospitality (Wirtbarkeit) means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. One may refuse to receive him when this can be done without causing his destruction; but, so long as he peacefully occupies his place, one may not treat him with hostility. It is not the right to be a permanent visitor (Gastrecht) that one may demand. A special beneficent agreement (ein … wohltätiger Vertrag) would be needed in order to give an outsider a right to become a fellow inhabitant for a certain length of time. It is only a right of temporary sojourn (ein Besuchsrecht), a right to associate, which all men have. They have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other. (Kant 1923: 443, 2006: 82; my translation)

Kant’s claim that, first, entry cannot be denied to those who seek it if this would result in their “destruction” (Untergang) has become incorporated into the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees of 1951 as the principle of non-refoulement. This principle obliges signatory states not to forcibly return refugees and asylum seekers to their countries of origin if doing so would pose a clear danger to their lives and freedom. Of course, just as sovereign states manipulate this Article to define life and freedom more or less narrowly when it fits their purposes, it is also possible to circumvent the non-refoulement clause by depositing refugees and asylees in so-called “safe third countries.” Many European countries resorted to this practice throughout the 1990s during the refugee crisis generated by the Yugoslav Civil War (see chapter 6 of this volume).

In Kant’s formulations, as in subsequent state practice, there remains an element of unchecked sovereign power. As Jacques Derrida has argued, hospitality always entails a moment of dangerous indeterminacy. Does the host know that the intentions of the guest are not hostile? How does one establish these intentions across vast communicational divides? Doesn’t hospitality often begin with mutual suspicion that needs to be overcome? Doesn’t this indeterminacy account for the linguistic proximity of the terms hostis and “hospice” – hostility and hospitality? This indete...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 FROM THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM
• 3 INTERNATIONAL LAW AND HUMAN PLURALITY IN THE SHADOW OF TOTALITARIANISM
• 4 ANOTHER UNIVERSALISM
• 5 IS THERE A HUMAN RIGHT TO DEMOCRACY?
• 6 TWILIGHT OF SOVEREIGNTY OR THE EMERGENCE OF COSMOPOLITAN NORMS?
• 7 CLAIMING RIGHTS ACROSS BORDERS
• 8 DEMOCRATIC EXCLUSIONS AND DEMOCRATIC ITERATIONS
• 9 THE RETURN OF POLITICAL THEOLOGY
• 10 UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA IN OUR TIMES
• Index