Cosmopolitanism in a Multipolar World

Soft Sovereignty in Democratic Regional Powers

J. Plagemann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137488220
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

Based on an analysis of the changing practice of sovereignty in Brazil, India and South Africa, this book argues that soft sovereignty provides an adequate, yet unrecognized, basis for a moderate, embedded and plural cosmopolitanism situated between globalism's demand for a world state and statism's defence of the status quo.

1

Cosmopolitanism, Sovereignty, and Multipolarity

Current global affairs are characterized by the interrelation of two mega-trends underlying day-to-day political developments, from the management of global financial crises to uprisings in the Arab world to the latest growth records in Africa. These two trends, namely globalization, on the one hand, and the rise of new powers from the non-Western world, on the other, are understood here as empirical developments.¹ They are, moreover, considered to be of particular relevance for a distinct position in international political theory that deals with fundamental matters of legitimacy and justice on a global scale, namely, cosmopolitanism. This relevance for normative political theory, however, is rarely acknowledged. In other words, given the pertinence of multipolarity in international affairs, non-ideal cosmopolitan theorizing needs to consider the transformations taking place in rising and regional powers from the Global South.

Globalization – the process of growing interconnectedness across the globe in economics, culture, and individual lifeworlds – has been widely debated. Discussions about its existence, definition, importance, and exact implications are ongoing (Deese, 2012). The meaning of the term has evolved from an economic sense to a much broader understanding that includes political, social, and cultural aspects (and dimensions relevant to the related academic disciplines). Today globalization is regarded by most scholars as a mega-trend that touches upon practically all aspects of social life and across all localities of the globe via a growing interdependence of states and societies, an emerging global civil society, transnationally shared interests, and the diffusion of norms. Horizontal communication and connections across ethnic, religious, and national divides affect more people across the globe than ever before – and have the potential to be politically transformative, as recent developments in the Arab world and elsewhere have illustrated. Transnationalization empowers the individual – or certain groups that are not nationally defined – against the nation-state (Pries, 2008). In the meantime, a more substantive normative consensus that moves beyond the common denominator of condemning genocide appears to be in the making, supported by states, non-state actors, and the global public. National borders have become increasingly less relevant for the flow of goods, people, and ideas. And global opinion poll research supports the claim that growing interconnectedness is paralleled by a convergence of fundamental values across societies (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005).²

‘Denationalization’ is diminishing the autonomy of the nation-state (or at least of its legislatives) by shifting responsibilities upwards to supranational institutions or, in some cases, downwards to innovative local or provincial institutions, thereby underpinning the loss of national sovereignty as a direct but unintended consequence of growing interconnectedness (Zürn, 1998; Sassen, 2003). The rise in numbers and – arguably – influence held by both international organizations and transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the 1990s and 2000s indicates a power shift away from national governments (Zürn, 2013). A changing terminology, from international relations to global governance, illustrates how ‘the language of subsidiarity has to some extent replaced the language of sovereignty’ (Kumm, 2009, p. 293). The much-cited lex mercatoria and its digital counterpart, the lex digitalis, offer the most visible example of transnational law without the nation-state (Teubner, 2010, p. 332). From a different angle, anthropologists and international legal scholars describe the evolution of a global legal pluralism with national, supranational, customary, and transnational non-state regulations interacting, particularly in the non-Western world with its own history of dependencies on foreign powers and their legal regimes (Randeria & Eckert, 2006). The West, from this perspective, is approaching the fractured sovereignty of the post-colonial nation-state, rather than the other way around. All of these processes undermine the ‘modern’ notion of national sovereignty, which comes complete with a powerful national centre willing and capable of deciding upon the extent of international enmeshment. Clearly, to understand globalization processes, it is crucial to examine their repercussions on a variety of levels, including the very local, rather than maintaining the focus of international relations on interstate relations and regulations (Sassen, 2003).

Meanwhile, new political entities have been set up in order to both deal with imminent transnational issues, as a reaction to otherwise non-political processes, and hasten the erosion of national sovereignty itself, as pro-active political decisions furthering regional and global political integration. The latter actions, more often than not, follow a variety of power-political calculations on the part of national governments, rather than a cosmopolitan script of political morality. One example is the introduction of the Euro. In this sense, steps that deepened political integration regularly occurred as an unintended consequence of intentional decision making (Beck & Grande, 2007, pp. 60–5). Willing or unwilling, national governments have contributed their share to promoting global interdependence. As a result, political theorists have identified a number of normative challenges that were either not present or less pronounced in a ‘Westphalian’ world of fairly closed sovereign nation-states.

One of the fundamental ethical questions which has far-reaching implications for just political institutions is what we owe to strangers. In a world in which the stranger is much closer to us than ever before, the question has become more urgent. If borders are ever more porous, then what constitutes a moral community? Furthermore, the reactions to processes undermining nationally legitimated, democratic governments and their legislatives have often involved the transfer of decision-making power to poorly legitimated international financial institutions or exclusive clubs of executives (Zürn, 1998, p. 238). For some, the transfer of sovereignty to international organizations precipitated a process of ‘internal erosion’ of national constitutions (Grimm, 2010, p. 4). Hence, executive powers are heightened. More, not less, illegitimate domination of the global citizen is a result of such an international response to global interdependence (Bohman, 2004, pp. 336–8). In The Globalization Paradox Dani Rodrik popularized the idea of a fundamental trilemma between economic integration, democratic principles, and national self-determination:

[We] cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination, and economic globalization. If we want to push globalization further, we have to give up either the nation-state or democratic politics. If we want to maintain and deepen democracy, we have to choose between the national state and international economic integration. And if we want to keep the nation-state and self-determination, we have to choose between deepening democracy and deepening globalization. (2011, p. xix)³

Democratic principles and effective global rule making appear to be conflicting goals that undermine the very fundament of republicanism. In order to be free, it is no longer enough to be the citizen of a free state (Bohman, 2004, p. 340).

Ostensibly, a globalized world creates new ethical problems, that is, demands for moral judgements, the most-cited example of which might be global warming. From a politico-institutional perspective, however, the search for political legitimacy beyond the nation-state creates the most urgent demand for moral judgements in the age of globalization. As various forms of institutionalized cooperation between states proliferated towards the end of the twentieth century, political theorists have to address the question of what political institutions that transcended the nation-state should look like. On the other hand, a globalized world also provides new answers to older questions that are grounds for or supply of moral judgement. The spreading recognition of human rights is a powerful example. After all, the prominence of human rights discourse in normative theory is not least due to the fact that its employment by activists and states has been so effective globally.⁴ An emerging global public and its consciousness is the foundation of global citizens’ participation and mobilization against breaches of humanitarian law worldwide, so the Kantian hope (Habermas, 2004, p. 125).

Given both demand for and supply of moral judgements, political theorists have increasingly resorted, since the 1990s, to cosmopolitanism as a political morality that is by definition global in scope. Cosmopolitanism, from this perspective, is the theoretical reflection of the ‘real trends that are eroding the classic union of sovereignty, territoriality, nationality and citizenship’ (Linklater, 2007, p. 93). Cosmopolitan thinking is anything but new, as it goes back to the ancient Stoics. However, its recent popularity, based on a specific reading of Immanuel Kant, is much more concerned with existing political institutions and their (il)legitimacy, economic inequalities, and questions of global justice than the theological focus of Stoicism, which lacks an immediate political dimension (Nussbaum, 1996, p. 52; Höffe, 2001, pp. 30–1).

What unites all forms of cosmopolitanism is the idea of the autonomous subject and, hence, the existence of a culturally independent, non-relativistic (that is universal) rationality (Nida-Rümelin, 2006, pp. 228–9). According to cosmopolitanism’s idea of human nature, individuals are theoretically and in practice able to regard themselves autonomously from the community they belong to (normative individualism). In the words of Rabindranath Tagore, ‘our mind has faculties which are universal, but its habits are insular’ (1993a, p. 45). From the assumption of common human reason follows the assumption of a set of basic moral rules governing the human species. Herein lies the insurmountable difference to all communitarian concepts of the individual (Nida-Rümelin, 2006, p. 229). In this sense, all humans belong to a single political community, and this world community ought to be cultivated. Hence, the relativization of national borders’ relevance in political and social terms is not only an empirical claim made by scholars of globalization but also – at least partially – the fulfilment of a fundamental normative demand of cosmopolitanism.

1.1 Regional and rising powers in international political theory

A second mega-trend has become visible throughout the early twentieth century. Contrary to expectations of prolonged unipolarity (Wohlforth, 1999, pp. 5–41), the hopes for an evolving global state (Shaw, 2000), and the dystopias of a clash of civilizations (Huntington, 1996), or a global ‘superclass’ of billionaires and multinationals (Rothkopf, 2000), rising powers from the global South – that is, nation-states – challenge the Western monopoly of power in an increasingly regional world (see Acharya, 2011). Rising powers are sometimes defined as states that have recently gained veto-player status but do not yet possess agenda-setting capabilities in global politics (Narlikar, 2013, p. 561). The least disputed rising powers are represented in leader-level coalitions from BRICS⁵ to IBSA⁶ and BASIC.⁷ After inviting South Africa to join its ranks in 2010, BRICS today stands for a group of countries that share a sense of entitlement to global power and the objective of balancing transatlantic hegemony in global politics (Narlikar, 2013, p. 562). Often they act together to realize this objective. IBSA unites the three democratic regional powers India, Brazil, and South Africa in a dialogue forum that, among other goals, aims to coordinate common positions in the United Nations (UN), such as the bid for permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and strengthening South-South cooperation in several other fields (Viera & Alden, 2011). Established in June 2003 with the idea of a southern G8 in mind, IBSA has provided an attractive alternative to the ailing Non-Alignment Movement (NAM). For its members, it has combined easy cooperation and lower costs of engagement shoulder-to-shoulder with other rising powers with the possibility of maintaining the old theme of South-South cooperation and solidarity. Or consider the BASIC coalition of Brazil, South Africa, India, and China that – to the dismay of established European powers – closed the negotiations with the US at the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change (Brown, 2012, pp. 161–2).

The fundamental changes arising from their recent economic growth and political stability may best be exemplified by Brazil, as a highly dependent debtor to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1980s and an esteemed creditor to the same institution from 2009 onwards. Indeed, the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP’s) recent Human Development Report devoted to the ‘rise of the South’ notes how larger – rising – states including the BASIC countries have advanced particularly rapidly (UNDP, 2013, pp. 148–51). Rising powers also represent a growing share of global economic output. The BRICS countries’ share of global gross domestic product, for instance, doubled from approximately 9 per cent in 2000 to more than 18 per cent in 2010 (Chanda, 2013, p. 215). Accordingly, G8 summits of industrialized nations appear increasingly outdated.

The rise of Southern powers also means that states and governments continue to shape global and domestic politics in very significant ways. Rising powers are now in a better position to manage their internal affairs as well as to influence political and economic processes within and beyond their region than they were throughout most of the last century. Thus, while the idea of ‘governance without government’ (Rosenau & Czempiel, 1992) may be appropriate to describe certain developments in transnational business, the importance of governments is anything but on a steady decline in global politics. Rising powers contribute to an increasingly multipolar constellation in which national governments play a key role.

1.1.1 Rising and regional powers

Most prominently, China has become the locomotive of global economic growth. Meanwhile, in countries such as Brazil, India, and South Africa, democratic and economic liberalization have strengthened these countries’ global and regional roles in power politics. Compared to traditional great powers, they can be labelled ‘regional powers’ because their influence is – with the exception of China – geographically focused.⁸ Nolte defines a regional power

as a state which articulates the pretension (self-conception) of a leading position in a region that is geographically, economically and political-ideationally delimited; which displays the material (military, economic, demographic), organisational (political) and ideological resources for regional power projection; which truly has great influence in regional affairs (activities and results). (2010, p. 893)

Regional powers are culturally and socially interconnected within their respective regions and are expected – by both states outside and inside the region – to assume a decisive role and act as leaders, often within regional governance structures (Nolte, 2010, p. 893). The political consolidation and economic growth of these regional powers is a historically unique process that assigns autonomy to formerly marginal powers in the Global South. This process constitutes another aspect of globalization: a mega-trend that runs parallel to the mega-trend described above. Given the preponderance of global power inequalities, the proliferation of regional organizations towards the end of the twentieth century and the often untapped (economic) potentials of closer regional cooperation, many rising powers have embraced the new role of regional leadership. As a result, regionalism and regional powers have increasingly gained prominence in international relations literature since the turn of the century (Godehardt & Nabers, 2011, pp. 1–3).⁹ This has fuelled sophisticated scholarship on issues such as regional hegemony (Nabers, 2010; Pedersen, 2002) and contestation (Williams, Lobell, & Jesse, 2012; Ebert, Flemes, & Strüver, 2014) as well as comparative regionalism (Jetschke & Lenz, 2013). Others claim that, instead of aiming for a fundamentally new order, rising powers merely seek more influence in the existing state-centred order (Ikenberry, 2011, p. 57).

Zaki Laïdi describes both democratic and autocratic members of BRICS as a ‘coalition of sovereign state defenders’ merely united by the desire to ‘erode western hegemonic claims by protecting the principle which these claims are deemed to most threaten, namely the political sovereignty of states’ (2012, p. 615). In the words of former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge G. Castaneda: ‘[ ... ] granting emerging economic powers a greater role on the world stage would probably weaken the trend toward a stronger multilateral system and an international legal regime that upholds democracy, human rights, nuclear non-proliferation, and environmental protection’ (2010, p. 117). Global interdependencies, it is claimed, are understood primarily as (Western) imperialist domination, a concern underscored by the continuing dominance of Western powers in global regulatory regimes. Indeed, this aspect of fragmentation in global power politics seems to imply the very opposite of the assumption of an increasingly less powerful nation-state that is dear to most cosmopolitans.

Rising and regional powers have themselves embraced the North-South dichotomy in their foreign-policy rhetoric, and the notion of sovereignty has often served as a focal point. While former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, for instance, repeatedly expressed sympathy for the post-Westphalian concept of soberania compartilhada (shared sovereignty) in the late 1990s, his successor President ‘Lula’ da Silva insisted on the more traditional understanding of national sovereignty ‘without adjectives’ (Saraiva, 2010a). Similarly, India’s foreign-policy elites in politics, the bureaucracy, and academia have always regarded the notion of the ‘sovereign nation-state that recognizes no higher authority’ as central to international relations (Bajpai, 2010, p. 522). BRICS countries have become ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Cosmopolitanism, Sovereignty, and Multipolarity
• 2  The Transformation of Sovereignty
• 3  The Transformation of Sovereignty in Brazil
• 4  The Transformation of Sovereignty in India
• 5  The Transformation of Sovereignty in South Africa
• 6  Soft Sovereignty and Fact-Sensitive Cosmopolitanism
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index