Review Essay: Global Governance without Global Government? Habermas on Postnational Democracy

See the excellent volume co-edited by Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth , Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2007).

Ingeborg Maus , “From Nation-State to Global State, or the Decline of Democracy,” Constellations 13 (2006): 465—84.

For a discussion of this issue, see William E. Scheuerman , “Critical Theory beyond Habermas,” in Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, ed. John S. Dryzek , Bonnie Honig , and Anne Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press , 2006), 94—103.

I use the tem “global governance” in the sense introduced by James N. Rosenau , “ Governance, Order, and Change in World Politics,” in Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, ed. James N. Rosenau and Ernst Otto-Czempiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1—29.

See Jürgen Habermas , “Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years' Hindsight,” in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Idea, ed. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 113—54.

Robert Dahl has updated these anxieties in his thoughtful “Can International Organizations Be Democratic? A Skeptic's View,” in Democracy's Edges, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 19—36.

Hauke Brunkhorst, Solidarity : From Civic Friendship to Global Legal Community, trans. Jeffrey Flynn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

His tendency to see the EU as a positive model for other supranational organizations generates problems. See the excellent essay by Adam Lupel , “Regionalism and Globalization: Post-nation or Extended Nation?” Polity 36 (2004): 153—74.

I do not know what else to call a state that regularly disregards binding international and domestic prohibitions on torture, practices indefinite detention, and establishes secret offshore interrogation (and, probably, torture) camps.

Recall the neglected argument by the first-generation Frankfurt School political theorist, Franz L. Neumann , who claimed that the dissolution of state sovereignty tended to go hand-in-hand with the disintegration of the rule of law (Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944]).

For a critical discussion of Habermas's reflections on this issue, see Robert Fine and Will Smith , “ Jürgen Habermas' Theory of Cosmopolitanism,” Constellations 10 (2003): 469—87.

In his comments on global terrorism, a similar economism tends to creep in. See Michel Rosenfeld , “Habermas' Call for Cosmopolitan Constitutional Patriotism in an Age of Global Terror,” Constellations 14 (2007): 159—81.

Think, for example, about recent global debates about international intervention in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Darfur.

For a sample of the huge debate, see the essays collected in Michael T. Greven and Louis W. Pauly , eds., Democracy beyond the Nation-State: The European Dilemma and the Emerging Global Order (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000 ).

Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation : Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press , 2006).

See, for example, the New Left Review in recent years, where Schmitt typically makes a favorable appearance in discussions of U.S. foreign policy.

Glyn Morgan , The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

I challenge this conventional view of Realism in “Realism and the Left: The Case of Hans J. Morgenthau ,” Review of International Studies (forthcoming). Realists like Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr are vastly more nuanced thinkers than Habermas—or most present-day cosmopolitans—prefer to concede.

Hans J. Morgenthau , Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1954), 93—154.

For a defense of this position, see Otfried Höffe , Demokratie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung (Munich, Germany: Beck, 1999).

Jürgen Habermas , “ A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society?” (paper presented at University of Chicago Political Theory Workshop , October 10, 2005).

To his credit, Habermas himself generally opposes this extreme view of what David Held and others have correctly criticized as the “hyper-globalization thesis” (David Held, Anthony McGraw, David Goldblatt , and Jonathan Perraton , Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999]).