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Newsletter on Philosophy and
International Cooperation
Olufemi Taiwo, editor Issue no. 95:1 Fall 1995
From the Editor
This is the inaugural issue of the latest addition to the APA stable of newsletters. In designing the Newsletter on Philosophy and International Cooperation, I have been guided by certain considerations. I reviewed the existing newsletters and their respective layouts. I found that the scope of the Committee on International Cooperation, the sponsor of this newsletter, is so broad that it is sure to encompass, possibly even encroach upon, themes that proliferate in some of the existing ones. For this reason, it is very important to be mindful of possible overlaps and ensure that duplication, when it occurs, is kept to a tolerable minimum. Despite this risk, I believe that the breadth suggested by “international cooperation” is simultaneously what promises to give this newsletter its distinctive character and peculiar strength. To this extent, it will provide a forum where global news about philosophy and philosophers will be disseminated, where philosophers/philosophies can meet across the many divisions extant in our world, where philosophers in North America will know about the state of the profession in other parts of the world, philosophers from abroad and those resident in North America can report their experiences of visits and professional exchanges, and so on. I plan to be very meticulous in maintaining the nonjournal character of the publication even as I strive to put out material that is well thought-out, carefully written, and elegantly presented. In pursuit of these aims, the outline of the newsletter will be as follows:
1. Each issue will open with some comments from the editor. These comments will be free ranging. Sometimes they will be editorials, especially on those occasions when the newsletter addresses specific issues or publishes presentations made under the auspices of the Committee at various fora sponsored by it.
2. Letters and other reader responses.
3. A section to be called “Philosophers Abroad.” In this section, North American philosophers traveling to and in different parts of the world are invited to contribute pieces of philosophical or general interest to philosophers which touch on the theme of international cooperation. It will also feature similar pieces from foreign philosophers visiting in North America. It is hoped that such pieces will further mutual understanding and, more importantly, encourage people to explore the pedagogical implications of everyday living across geographical and cultural boundaries.
4. In another section called “Philosophy Abroad,” from time to time, foreign philosophers will be invited to inform us about the state of professional philosophy in their countries. This will include discussions/summaries of current debates in those countries, the issues that dominate professional philosophy in them, their sense of the relative strengths and weaknesses of professional practice in them, and so on. The importance of this kind of information cannot be overemphasized. At a time like this when there is intense pressure to diversify the philosophy curriculum, and the number of those canvassing diversification is growing, information to be garnered from this section must aid those looking for opportunities to live and work elsewhere, or students seeking different experiences for study abroad requirements.
5. It will encourage philosophers from other countries to publicize their presence and activities in its pages. By so doing, other departments will be apprised of the presence of such persons just in case they would like to take advantage of their expertise for purposes of talks, symposia, colloquia, etc.
6. It will carry a digest of announcements, events, books, films, and similar materials relevant to its theme.
This first issue does not reflect the outline described above, but subsequent numbers should do so. How soon the plan begins to be realized will be determined by how quickly contributors respond to the invitations above. Meanwhile, this inaugural issue does start out on an appropriate note with the contributions to the last CIC-sponsored Roundtable on “Nationalism and Internationalism: Philosophical Perspectives,” held on December 28, 1994, at the Eastern Division Meeting. I would like to thank the contributors for prompt submission of their materials and William McBride, the past chairperson of the committee for facilitating the process. I thank Jeanne Huchthausen and Leslie Brissette, staff of the Philosophy Department, Loyola University, Chicago, and Leslie Thomson, our work-study assistant, for doing the bulk of the typing of the newsletter with grace and good humor.
Reports
COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
APA Committee on International Cooperation, 1995-96 (CIC)
David A. Crocker, University of Maryland, Chair
David Burrell, University of Notre Dame
Nancy Fraser, Northwestern University
Daniel Garber, University of Chicago
Ricardo Gomez, California State University-LA
Roy Martinez, Spelman College
Georges Rey, University of Maryland
Kwong-Loi Shun, University of California-Berkeley
Gisela Striker, Harvard University
Olufemi Taiwo, Loyola University-Chicago
REPORT ON RECENT CIC EVENTS
1. Eastern Division Meeting. The APA Committee on International Cooperation (CIC) sponsored two sessions at the APA Eastern Division meeting, Boston, MA, December 27-30, 1994.
a. Special Session: “Philosophy in Africa South of the Sahara” (Co-sponsored by the International Development Ethics Association)
Chair: Olufemi Taiwo, Loyola University
Speakers: “Personal Identity Issues in African Metaphysics”
Leke Adeofe, Florida International University
“Tradition, Communication and Difference: Building Bridges in African Philosophy”
Dismas Masolo, Antioch College
“Multiple Identities and the Power of Gender”
Nkiru Nzegwu, State University of New York, Binghamton
b. International Open Forum: “Nationalism and Internationalism: Philosophical Perspectives”
Chair: William McBride, Purdue University
Speakers: Omar Dahbour, Vicente Medina, Natalija Micunovic, Stephen Nathanson, Mortimer Sellers, Henry Theriault, and other selected philosophers from the U.S. and abroad.
This session, like its predecessors in 1993, was designed to provide an occasion, early in the Eastern Division meeting, in which philosophers from abroad and U.S. philosophers could make brief (5 minute) informal presentations concerning some previously announced international theme. The setting was that of a roundtable. Summaries of the presentations may be in a future issue of the APA Proceedings. [The summaries of the presentations are published in this issue. Ed.]
2. Pacific Division Meeting. The APA Committee on International sponsored one session at the APA Pacific division meeting, San Francisco, CA, March 29-April 1, 1995.
a. Symposium: “Analytic Philosophy in Argentina”
Chair: Ricardo J. Gomez, California State University, Los Angeles
Speakers: “On the Reception of Analytic Philosophy in Argentina Some Rortyan Themes”
Eduardo Rabossi, Universidad de Buenos Aires
“Quinean Views in Analytic Philosophy in Argentina”
Alberto Morretti, Universidad de Buenos Aires
“Analytic Philosophy and the Social Sciences in Argentina”
Felix Schuster, Universidad de Buenos Aires
3. Central Division Meeting. The APA Committee on International Cooperation sponsored one session at the APA Central Division meeting, Chicago, IL, April 26-29, 1995.
a. Special Session: “Philosophy of Liberation”
Chair: Michael Barber, Saint Louis University
Speakers: Enrique Dussel, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de
Mexico
James Marsh, Fordham University
Francisco Miro-Quesada, Lima, Peru
Mario Teodoro Ramirez, Ramelia, Mexico
Eduardo Monieta, Harvard University
Articles
Making Sense of Globalism
Stephen Nathanson
Northeastern University
I began to think seriously about national loyalty when I realized that it is a mistake to equate patriotism with militarism or blind obedience to government. Seeing through this error led me to acknowledge that the motivation to act on behalf of one’s own country need not be a bad thing. This is not to deny that national sentiment has produced many evils. But recognizing this fact settles nothing. It simply sets the stage for trying to understand what the differences are between legitimate and illegitimate forms of national loyalty.
In Patriotism, Morality, and Peace,1 I argue that patriotism is permissible so long as the promotion of one’s own country’s well-being does not lead one to treat other people immorally. By honoring the constraints that morality places on the pursuit of all goals, patriots can make their commitment to their nation morally legitimate. Morality does not stop at the border. It applies universally but nonetheless permits all to promote the well-being of their particular country so long as moral constraints are accepted on the means they use to do so. In addition to honoring negative duties not to harm those outside one’s country, morality also requires positive action to aid other peoples when their needs are pressing and one’s own resources are abundant.
Looking back, I see that when I began my thinking about these subjects, I took nationalism to be morally problematic. At the same time, I assumed that the universalist ideals that motivated a suspicious attitude toward nationalism were both clear and true. It seemed self-evident that some kind of global humanism, internationalism, or cosmopolitanism had to be correct. I think many people share this perspective, objecting to globalism that it is impractical or too idealistic, while assuming that they know what it is and that it is correct.2
I want to suggest that the ideals that lead people to reject nationalism are themselves unclear and that, on some natural interpretations, they are neither desirable nor morally acceptable. I will mention two areas where clarification and assessment are especially urgent.
First, it is unclear what global internationalism implies about the multitude of associations to which human beings belong. If nations were to disappear tomorrow, we would still face a world containing many human groups, ranging from families, neighborhoods and tribes to religions and cultures. Competition for resources would remain, as would the feelings of suspicion and discomfort that human differences often provoke. There would still be group pride and the desire to see one’s own group flourish. Indeed, all of the motivations that Hobbes saw as the roots of conflict—competition, fear, and vainglory—would continue to exist in a world without nations.
The question for globalists is whether all human associations are to be wished away, as globalists often want to wish away nations. Or is there room in the globalist’s world for special ties to individuals and groups?
While it may seem obvious that no sane person would seek to destroy all special relationships, the heart of the globalist ideal is an egalitarian, universalist moral vision that emphasizes the equal worth of all people and the artificiality of the ties that bind us to some and divide us from others. From this perspective, family ties are as morally arbitrary as national ties, and, as the tales of Hatfields and McCoys, Montagues and Capulets remind us, they can be equally divisive.
The dilemma for global internationalists is this. A world without particularist affections and loyalties would be a cold, grim place that would lack some of life’s most valuable features. But if globalists permit such associations, they leave in place the same seeds of conflict that exist among nations. The globalist’s dilemma is that opposition to all groups is preposterous and destructive, while acceptance of them leaves in place all the things that globalists oppose.
A second problem concerns the globalist response to pleas for national self-determination. Presumably, global internationalists reject nationalism and seek to weaken the role of national institutions in human life. They want a world in which all individuals are respected and in which artificial differences lose their influence on human conduct. In our world, however, national and other group differences have a great deal of influence, and it is not clear how globalists can coherently respond to this fact.
Consider two arguments for a national state. The first, defensive nationalism, appeals to the fact that particular groups are often targets of persecution and may see possession of a state as the best way to defend their survival.3 The second, cultural nationalism, is rooted in the belief that only by having a state of its own can a particular group sustain its language or culture.
These arguments create a second dilemma for globalists. While globalism’s opposition to nationalism naturally leads to a rejection of these arguments, other aspects of the globalist attitude seem to require their acceptance. If globalists are genuinely concerned about all human beings, this seems to require both support for a state for people whose existence is threatened without one, and respect for people’s desire to fashion their lives in accord with their own cultural ideas.
There are two serious problems for globalists here. First, the globalist ideal is vague, so we don’t know what globalism implies about such cases. Second, when we try to generate answers from a globalist perspective, we get contradictory responses.
In raising these criticisms, I do not seek to discredit the moral ideals that motivate the globalist perspective. Rather, I want to argue that once we get beyond platitudes, there are serious difficulties in making the globalist vision both clear and plausible. The clearest versions are implausible, while the plausible ones are vague and lacking in real content.
In concluding, I would like to offer a suggestion about the direction in which globalism can be clarified and developed. I suggest that we can best develop globalism by severing it from the vision of a world without nations where all people are one. This extreme universalist vision is incompatible with a recognition of the legitimate needs of people and with the acknowledgment of the richness that diverse groups contribute to human life.
A more plausible form of globalism turns out to be congruent with moderate patriotism. The moderate globalist affirms the application of basic moral duties and basic moral protections to all people. As long as these moral universals are honored (for example, by respect for human rights and the rejection of aggressive war), then people may support whatever associations contribute to their well being and cultural aspirations. Such associations may be nations, religions, or other kinds of groups. Even if nations do disappear at some future time, there is no reason to believe either that all groups will disappear or that such a disappearance would enhance human life.
The kind of moderate globalism that I am recommending is pluralistic rather than unitary. It honors both the unity of human beings as well as the diversity of human individuals and groups. While less visionary than extreme globalism, this moderate view is more than visionary enough to challenge our abilities to make it real.
Endnotes
1. Rowman and Littlefield, 1993.
2. The view that the meaning and truth of globalism are evident can be seen in Martha Nussbaum’s recent essay, “Patriotism or Cosmopolitanism.” Many of Nussbaum’s critics reject her cosmopolitan vision because it is too idealistic rather than seeing it as mistaken. For Nussbaum’s essay and criticisms of it, see The Boston Review, October/November 1994 and February/March 1995.
3. For a brief but powerful expression of the “defensive nationalist” argument, see Amos Oz, In the Land of Israel (New York: Random House, 1983), 130-31.
Eurocentrism and Sloppy Social Science
Henry C. Theriault
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
In works on nationalism and nation-formation of the past 15 years, there has been a tendency to develop general models out of a study of European nations and associated states, and then to apply them to other areas. For instance, Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, develops a general model of nation-formation based on the histories of early European nations. He then treats subsequent waves of nation and nation-state (I note that he does not differentiate adequately between these) formation by reworking his initial model respectively for the particular circumstances of early nineteenth century South and Central America, of nineteenth century Eastern Europe, and finally of twentieth century Asia and Africa. Many other theorists—though with completely different accounts of nation formation, and, indeed, different concepts of the nation—follow similar methodologies.
The reasoning of such theorists generally depends on two points of interpretation of modern history: (1) Because of its superiority in terms of economic and political power relative to other forms of large-scale political organization, the nation-state became more and more widespread in the modern era. Emerging groups (such as colonial populations) had only the nation-state as a way of gaining political power and, indeed, a bare existence in the global political realm. Thus, in the modern era, objective circumstances determined that emerging groups seeking political legitimacy and power developed European-style national movements, whose goals were nation-states. (2) The influence of West European thought on the rest of the world, particularly its colonies, was strong. As a result, non-West Europeans consciously followed the European nation-state model when developing “modern” political and social structures.
There are a number of specific points for discussion here. First, the European models often fail to fit the circumstances and paths of the formation of non-European nations. For instance, application of Anderson’s general model to nation-formation in Asia and Africa requires him to locate sole agency in the native colonial administrators, who—according to Anderson—formed a proto-national community, based on their shared experiences. However, in reality, the main native opponents of anticolonial national movements came from the ranks of the very native administrators Anderson focuses on. Clearly, their shared experiences cannot be taken as a basis for nation-building.
Second, Anderson’s account ignores the significant role of non-elites, not influenced by European thought (except in an indirect, negative, material way), particularly peasants, in many anti-colonial national movements. This in effect denies agency to non-Europeans in forming nations. According to the model, objective circumstances and subjective preferences condition non-Europeans to be mere passive emulators of European political developments. But, the actual history of many non-European national movements suggests that in some cases the influence of Europe was only partial, and in fact “European thought” was a passive object absorbed by a dominant native tradition (which must be understood differently than is usual), according to its own methods and designs. Failing to recognize this means collapsing potentially quite significant variations of the European nation form into a limited typology whose range is the range of European nations. Indeed, it means limiting our understanding of what a nation is—of the variety of possibilities due to different historical and cultural traditions—to one variant. Not only does this function to reinforce neo-colonial domination, but at a more abstract level, it is sloppy social science.
Part of a discussion of this issue might focus on the problematic conception of “tradition” held by many of the theorists in question (particularly Eric Hobsbawm). Generally, such theorists view traditions as static regulators of behavior antithetical to progressive development. But, traditions often are flexible trajectories of development that, rather than freezing progress, focus it in certain directions. That these directions are often not in line with Euro-American interests, which are perceived to be progressive, suggests to such theorists that these traditions are not progressive, but are in fact retrogressive.
This suggests a third issue. Europe’s historical lead in the development of the nation and nation-state has come to be linked to its material prosperity and political and military power. It is then reasoned that the success of contemporary emergent national groups in attaining this prosperity depends on how fully they are able to emulate European models. Thus, the material inferiority of non-European groups is not due to the derivative nature of their political and social structures, but rather to the fact that these structures are not derivative enough. This is the rationale behind the international development movement of the past 30 years, and it is echoed and reinforced in the literature on the nation.
The development movement has failed utterly in its ostensible goal. Usually, the governments of “Third World” countries, corruption, cultural backwardness, and so forth are blamed for the failures. However, the foregoing suggests that the very goal of development is based on incorrect assumptions about the flexibility of the European model. The model cannot be assumed to fit the particular histories, situation, social structures, and cultures of “Third World” countries. In particular, as former colonies still subject to European dominance, the situation of these countries is entirely different from that of the first European nation-states. Ultimately, forcing development on the European model actually weakens non-European countries, and reinforces and extends Euro-American superiority. In discussing this issue, it would be interesting to consider such things as (1) the relationship of theories and theorists of the nation to the international development movement and (2) the alternatives to development open to non-European countries, given the strength of the interstate system and international capitalism. Regarding the second issue, we might discuss the complex relationship between states, nations, and transnational corporations that is emerging under GATT.
There is another important consequence of applying European models of nation-formation to non-European national movements. By doing so, theorists are committed to conceptual models that make it impossible for them to perceive the significant roles women have played in national movements, particularly in the “Third World.” These roles, which are seldom discussed at all by mainstream theorists on the nation, vary greatly across the globe. By viewing events elsewhere through a European lens, theorists miss this variety, and, in fact, the importance of women in many national movements. Indeed, a European gender bias that has excluded women from significant participation in nation-formation—indeed, a concept of the nation that reflects and reinforces patriarchy—is imposed on the rest of the world, obscuring the actual relationships between gender and nation-formation outside of Europe. This is not by any means to suggest that there is no gender-oppression outside of Western Europe and North America, but that even it does not necessarily follow a European model, and is, further, greatly complicated by European colonization.
Nationalism and Internationalism: Philosophical Perspectives
Omar Dahbour
Colorado College
I want to make three points about the dichotomy of nationalism and internationalism and then say a bit more about each of them. First: the difference between nationalism and internationalism is intimately related to what has been called the individualist-communitarian debate, a debate wherein a liberal internationalism committed to a minimal regime of individual rights is squared off against a conservative nationalism in which political regimes are properly based on communities devoid of significant cultural differences. This debate is not so much a caricature of real political disputes, though it may also be that, as it is a debate between two impossibilities, since neither conception of political community can account for what we know a viable regime must do. Second: the nationalist revival of recent years is predicated on a mistake—the idea that nations are entities that can have rights, and in particular, rights to their political self-determination. In philosophy, this revival has increasingly gone under the name of “liberal nationalism,” a term that is, on my account, an oxymoron. Third: if there is to be a new internationalism—an idea that I at least see a great need for—it can only be an ecological or “green” internationalism, not either a socialist or a liberal internationalism, both of which have been done in by the set of conditions that produced the collapse of communism, on the one hand, and the end of prosperity, on the other.
[1] The dispute between individualist and communitarian versions of political legitimacy comes down to this, in my view: does a political community need to agree upon a “thick description” of what that community should be—does it, in more philosophical terms, need a unitary conception of the good life? The answer, I believe, must be “yes”; yet, this should give little comfort to the communitarians, since they have manifestly failed to give any conception of the good life that can command my assent, at any rate. Politically, the two sides of this debate advocate either a liberal procedural state that in principle cannot embody a commitment to a substantive definition of the good life or an ethnic nation-state that defines this good life as adherence to a unitary conception of ethnic identity. The liberal procedural state, as some critics have pointed out, in fact always relies on an unacknowledged substantive commitment to a society based on economic growth and on an ideal of capitalist industrialization and urbanization. Yet, this ideal is more and more inaccessible to most of the world today and even if it were possible, would be undesirable because of its devastating environmental costs. The ethnic nation-state, similarly, is today increasingly impossible—and perhaps always was historically exceptional—given the rise in this century of transnational migrations. In any case, how can a belief be retained in the viability of nation-states as the basis for prosperity and security in the face of the increasing globalization both of economies and of environmental problems which themselves have far-reaching economic consequences? I conclude that neither model of political community is one that we can find compelling today.
[2] Though nationalists might contend that whether or not others find their view of a legitimate political community compelling, it is their right to have nation-states if they so choose, there is in fact no such right that is justifiable for legal, moral, political, or historical reasons. In particular, claims that there is a right of national self-determination prove unfounded once the philosophical premises for such claims are examined. While persons may be able to claim rights to self-development, and peoples may be able to claim rights to noninterference by other states, ethnic nations have no rights that are distinguishable from the basic human rights of freedom and security found in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and like documents. Furthermore, attempting to argue for such national rights as an extension of other liberal entitlements for individuals or communities only reveals the circularity of the liberal theory of the state, a theory that must incorporate substantive assumptions about the good life, without acknowledging them as such. How unfortunate that these assumptions are, on some accounts, to be the nationalist ones that are so often antithetical to other liberal ideals.
[3] Though there is today seemingly no extant political internationalism, at least of the liberal or socialist varieties, the global environmentalist movement can perhaps provide us with some ideas for constructing a new form of internationalism. The goals both of socialist society and of capitalist prosperity have a common origin, on the account of ecological critics, in a commitment to a regime of economic growth and capital accumulation (even if it is defined as socialized capital). Yet, it is possible to conceive of communities organized neither for purposes of economic growth nor of national identity, if they are thought of as emphasizing local forms of sustainable production for use. This social-ecological perspective incorporates both a conception of local and regional self-reliance that will inevitably vary between different ecologies, and a conception of global responsibilities that suggest the purpose, if not the exact means, of older versions of internationalism. The view of political communities as based on particular social ecologies—particular ways of organizing society for sustainable uses of their natural environments—departs from classic internationalism in its contention that different forms of adaptation (different social ecologies) will be necessary given different environments. It also differs from a nationalism that espouses the value of local identities, yet often destroys these same identities in the process of establishing unitary nation-states. In any case, the increasing weakness both of ideals of international cooperation and of national statehood in the face of changing conditions suggests the urgency of finding a new understanding of what political communities are and what their responsibilities to others must be.
Bloody Nationalism: The Good Life and Liberal Democracy
Hans Seigfried
Loyola University Chicago
In his recent book, Blood and Belonging, Michael Ignatieff describes civic nationalism as the idea “that the nation should be composed of all those—regardless of race, color, creed, gender, language, or ethnicity—who subscribe to the nation’s political creed”; according to this creed, “what holds a society together is not common roots but law.1 This idea was born in the American and French revolutions, and “most Western nation-states,” he finds, “now define their nationhood in terms of common citizenship and not by common ethnicity. One prominent exception is Germany.”2
In their patriotic anger against Napoleon’s invasion and occupation in 1806, he observes, the German Romantics argued against this modern ideal “that it was not the state that created the nation, . . . but the nation, its people, that created the state. What gave unity to the nation, what made it a home, a place of passionate attachment, was not the cold contrivance of shared rights but the people’s preexisting ethnic characteristics: their language, religion, customs, and traditions. . . . All the people of nineteenth century Europe under imperial subjection . . . looked to the German ideal of ethnic nationalism when articulating their right to self-determination.”3
A century later, in their struggle for self-determination many ethnic groups again embrace this ideal of the German Romantics. Last summer, when Jacques Toubon tried to push through a “language-protection law imposing fines and even jail terms for advertisers who use foreign (i.e., English) terms when a French equivalent exists,” the French themselves seemed to be ready for it.4 Fifty years ago, at the end of the catastrophic attempt to realize it in a grand state, most of us wanted to believe that this bloody ideal finally lost its appeal.5 What mattered and held us together on the local and global scale, many of us felt, could not be ethnic roots and characteristics in which we have no say, but the choices and decisions individuals make in light of the objective conditions under which they live. As a rule with rare exceptions, we had learned, appeals to national and collective ethnic identity lead to discrimination, isolation, and extermination of those who do not belong to “the people” and the nation.
The identity of individuals that matters emerges in each case in the struggle with other individuals and the institutions they operate. Against Ignatieff I would like to observe that none of our existing democratic institutions qualifies for what he describes as civic nationalism. Local traditions, religious creeds, metaphysical beliefs, and the other ethnic characteristics described by the German Romantics as the basis of communal living, still determine civic life all over the globe to a large extent. It is in the struggle with these deep and dark roots that individuals form their civic identity. For like fate and destiny, these roots claim individuals, prescribe how they must live, and determine that it is the end of individuals, in Dewey’s words, “fitfully and imperfectly to reproduce some universe of reality already externally constituted and externally complete in itself, and set as a model for [them] to copy and conform to,” in short, to be good Germans, Americans, etc.6
At the end of WWII, some of us finally realized that there is no single idea that has done more harm in our bloody history than the belief that the aim of civic living is the realization of some ready-made form of the good life, inscribed in ethnic codes, spelled out in moral maxims, and guarded by communal institutions. When the representatives signed the “Charter of the United Nations” in 1945, they must have been convinced, as Lyotard puts it in a different context and much later, that politics “cannot have the good at stake, but [it] ought to have the lesser evil. Or, if you prefer, the lesser evil ought to be the political good.”7 What the representatives spelled out in “We, the peoples of the United Nations” as the aims of politics and the standards for civic living are nothing but the empirical and experimental conditions for avoiding the worst of “the bad” experienced in the two great wars, not the contrived conditions of “the good” that some people claim to have inherited with their ethnic and/or moral codes.
Clearly, there is no reference to some ethnic or universal moral code as a safeguard for the good life. Postmodernists like Lyotard are not the first ones to fear that the complete and final realization of the good life, prescribed by ethnic or universal moral codes, will issue in a totalitarian suppression of all those who are ethnically different or do not conform to some locally accepted universal code, as it did in the past. Today, while our war memories slowly fade away, we hear again about violent efforts to establish nation-states on the basis of common roots and about philosophical endorsements of a universal moral code. Habermas, for instance, claims that “only a universalistic morality, which demonstrates general norms, can be defended with good reasons.”8 And Vittorio Hösle declares that “the expansion of Western culture should be primarily devoted to the propagation of a universalistic morality.”9
But in 1945, nothing could have been farther away from the minds of the representatives of the United Nations in San Francisco, both non-Western and Western. As the opening statement says, their negotiations were guided by the determination to avoid under similar empirical circumstances the repetition of the horrors experienced in the two world wars. We will inevitably have to reconceive and rebeget the problems the UN representatives addressed in 1945 in light of our present circumstances. Philosophers will be able to assist in it only if they aim, as Dewey puts it, “at a philosophy which shall be instrumental rather than final, and instrumental not to establishing and warranting any particular set of truths, but instrumental in furnishing points of view and working ideas which may clarify and illuminate the actual and concrete course of life.”10
Endnotes
1. Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 6f.
2. Ibid., 7.
3. Ibid.
4. See Theodore Stanger and Marcus Mabry, “Liberté, Egalité, Médiocrité,” in Newsweek, June 20, 1994, p. 50.
5. For the connection between the “idealism” of the German Romantics and Nazism, see John Dewey, “The One-World of Hitler’s National Socialism” (1942), in The Middle Works, 1899-1924, Volume 8: 1915, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), pp. 421-446.
6. See John Dewey, “Philosophy and American Life” (1904), in The Middle Works, 1899-1906, Volume 3: 1903-1906, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), p. 74f.
7. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 140. “Behavior is explained not by the consequences that lie ahead, but by those that have followed in the past,” as B.F. Skinner observes. See his letter to the editor, in TLS, March 9-15, 1990, p. 253.
8. See Jürgen Habermas, Rede zur Verleihung des Hegel-Preises (1974), quoted in Rudolf Walther, “Was ist ‘nationale Identität’?,” in Die Zeit (Overseas edition), 49 (19. Aug 1994), p. 16.
9. See Hubertus Breuer, “Hegel kehrt zurück,” in Die Zeit (Overseas edition), August 19, 1994, p. 18.
10. John Dewey, “Philosophy and American National Life,” p. 77.
Patriotism and Nationalism
Natalija Mi unovi
Patriotism is an older term than nationalism, being in use for people who have been born in a country with a specific system, like the Roman empire, but without a specific nation, though belonging to a tribe or an ethnic group. Like that other important term, the hallmark of law and order, of any kind of hierarchy, tradition and conservatism, namely, patriarchy, it also has its root in the word pater—father. Though there are languages in which fatherland is motherland or simply a place where a person is born, the spirit and the feeling of patriotism is well expressed by its rootedness in the word father. Patriotism was born at about the same time as “the interest of the state” was born, at the dawn of the idea of the “common good.” Just as, in feudal times, one’s self-interest or the interest of one’s family or loyalty to one’s lord and master was the thing that could motivate behavior, there is no patriotism without the sense of working for the well being of one’s place of birth. In modern times, patriotism becomes the feeling for one’s place of birth or residence not by virtue of its being simply ours, hence for the sake of nostalgia for good times and the pleasant though unrealistic feeling of continuity in our own lives, but for the higher principle of our way of life as being simply the best, most democratic, holy, true, rich, universal.
Nation is the first political abstraction; consequently, it has great powers of shape-shifting. It can mean different things, play different roles, encompass a different population each time. It is a useful institution for strengthening power or exerting influence over people.
In the war in Yugoslavia, patriotism was talked about as a feeling or activity with a changing object. Patria was Yugoslavia, or Serbia, or Croatia, or my own village, or the community of people who dress or eat or pray similarly to me. Again, the place of birth or residence was checked through the feature of belonging to a community of people whose fathers have similar names; identification cards on new borders or checkpoints were actually checked for that seemingly innocuous fact: the name of the father. So you can be reduced to a being belonging to one of a group of lords and masters with similar names. In data concerning birth certificates in Serbia lately, it does not surprise anyone that names of female children are as fanciful and international as ever, whereas names of male children are in the overwhelming majority traditional Serbian names.
In Serbia now, there is a ghost of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, its former self, so to speak, in every street sign and every store. Enormous efforts on the part of nationalists to exorcise it produce comical effects and are basically in vain. This does not mean, however, that the Second Yugoslavia lives on even in glory. The obvious culprits are not so surprising as the intellectuals. Intellectuals of the former, second Yugoslavia, proved to be weak on several fronts. They are mostly nationalistic, some of them have left the region, some are scared, some depressed, and some resemble Don Quixote of La Mancha at his worst. This shows, I think, not some genetic or cultural defect peculiar to the Balkans, as much as the weakness of intellectual discourse in general when faced with real life.
When does patriotism become nationalism? In stories about the births of nations, an important ingredient has been a strong belief that members of a given nation have a great—if not rich, at least romantically tragic—destiny to share. That is why America and Israel, France and India are such successes. It is easier to swallow such a story if the people have the same origin or the same destination, the same genes, or the same religion. But it is important they have representatives who represent them by virtue of embodying the typical virtues of the nation and by understanding and following the national destiny, and not by merely articulating their common interest, like the simple representatives of citizens in a kind of citizens’ council.
The rhetoric of patriotism is usually retained (maybe also parodied in a way) in the apologia of nationalism. There is a gradual loss of the theme of well-being for all, and there is a new rigidity and exclusivity, endowed with a true pathos: this rhetoric does not concern itself with such trivial matters as standard of living. What’s a new car compared to a role in history? The ideology of nationalism is fed by mythology and romantic historical consciousness because its goal is to prove superiority (at least the superiority of the story). Victories (or even tragic, heroic losses and failures, such as the Battle of Kosovo) and a right to vengeance are its themes of aggression. There is no longer a private life or an individual interest, a differing opinion or a rational choice—everything is measured against the hero-betrayer dialectic. There is a spiral upswing of irrationality and hypocrisy.
Yugoslavia was a multinational country and it was also a socialist country for the last forty-six years of its existence. The collective ideology of socialism, with its downplaying of individual rights and individual differences and downplaying of nationalist mythology, with religion—the only traditional differing factor among the three nations that are still at war—strangely coupled with the organization of the state as dependent on national oligarchies, was a good starting point for national conflict. The lack of any political or economical pluralism and the failure of socialism made it comforting to go back in history “before the experiment.” This coincided (harmonized?) with a certain disappointment in the present and the future that was felt globally. Paradoxically, everybody, both as individuals and as groups, now keeps becoming worse and worse off, but that was never really the point; it could be a lack of understanding on our part to believe that all that people want is to be better off. Often, they want above all to feel more important, and that is one illusion manipulators of nations can supply.
Nationalism is the patriotism of a nation state, and in a multinational state there is a choice: one can be a patriot who is engaged in activity to further the interests of and the feeling of a sense of pride about the multinational state as a whole, or a nationalist of a particular nation—that is, one who is engaged in activity to further the interests of and the feeling of a sense of pride about one’s particular nation, race, religious community, ethnic group, or tribe. In a multinational state, nationalism of a nation that is largely dominant poses as patriotism. All states are more or less multinational. Extreme nationalists see any other state of affairs but having their own nation-state as oppression. All nationalism leads to the break-up of multinational states. By and large, patriotism is not in the best interest of one’s patria.
Our America: A Dilemma in a Latin American
Politics of Culture
Vicente Medina
Seton Hall University
The expression ‘Our America’ (Nuestra América) is the title of an important polemical essay written in 1891 by a nineteenth century Cuban romantic writer and poet—José Martí.1 It is plausible to argue that Martí’s essay has influenced Latin Americans as Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men” (Second Discourse) has influenced Europeans. Like Rousseau, Martí offers an account of a politics of culture that may illuminate current controversies about cultural identity, cultural diversity, and the so-called politics of recognition.2
For Martí, ‘Our America’ has at least five different but not mutually exclusive connotations: (1) geographical, (2) cultural, (3) linguistic, (4) historical, and (5) political. Geographically, ‘Our America’ refers to the conglomerate of countries encompassing Central, South America, and the Caribbean. Culturally, it designates a collage of European, African, Asian, and indigenous cultural traditions. Likewise, linguistically, ‘Our America’ denotes a heterogeneous presence of mostly European and indigenous languages. Moreover, historically, it refers to a collective experience of colonization and subsequent wars of independence against European colonizers—a community of shared memories. In the political sense, however, ‘Our America’ is a value-laden and hence contestable expression that entails a politics of culture.
‘Our America’ may be defined in opposition to foreign cultures (e.g., North American and European cultures) as vindicating autochthonous ways of life. Yet a serious problem exists about the concept of a way of life. How are we to assess different ways of life? To answer that Latin Americans should pursue a specific way of life just because it is “theirs” may be interpreted in two ways: Either as a matter of fact chauvinistic claim or as an unfounded ideological belief.3
Thus to escape the horns of the above dilemma, it is necessary to offer convincing reasons that transcend cultural boundaries. If a specific people’s way of life is preferable to other people’s competing way of life, it is so not only because it is theirs, but, more importantly, because it may, e.g., provide a necessary cultural context in which they can successfully flourish.4 However, the recognition of a specific cultural context is insufficient for people to flourish. In addition, two universal natural rights should be recognized (e.g., a right to life and a right to liberty) without which a concept of human flourishing would be precarious at best.5
Apparently, there is a tension between emphasizing the notion of a specific cultural context and that of universal natural rights. To the extent that we focus on a specific cultural context we are excluding nonmembers from this cultural enclave, and, consequently, there exists a potential for violating their natural rights. Conversely, to the extent that we concentrate on protecting universal natural rights there exists a potential for neglecting a specific cultural context from which people can make meaningful choices.
In his essay, Martí attempts to reconcile a politics of culture (which highlights a genuine and thereby particular Latin American cultural context) with an implicit politics of natural rights. Why should Latin Americans choose Martí’s vision over someone else’s vision? Because his vision incorporates an accurate description of past and present cultural conflicts among Latin Americans, e.g., between natural humanity and artificial humanity, between Nature and false erudition, between the city and the country, in short between the oppressed and the oppressor.6 In addition, people should not pretend to be what they are not. Why is an indigenous Latin American culture desirable for Latin Americans? By respecting the natural rights to life and liberty and acknowledging the richness of their specific cultural context, Latin Americans may flourish as authentic individuals. Obviously, a permanent tension remains between the particularity of a given cultural context and the recognition of universal natural rights. However, for Martí, authentic individuals are those who courageously accept the challenge to live with such a tension without succumbing to either chauvinist temptations or to foreign utopian ideals.
Endnotes
1. José Martí, “Nuestra América,” in José Martí: Obras Completas, vol. 6 (Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975), pp. 15-23. A translation of Martí’s essay appeared in Our America by José Martí: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence, edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Philip Foner (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), pp. 84-94.
2. For an interesting collection of essays about cultural diversity, see Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” edited by Amy Gutman, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
3. See my article, “The Possibility of an Indigenous Philosophy: A Latin American Perspective,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 4 (October 1992), pp. 373-380.
4. For a plausible defence of the positive value of a cultural context within a liberal perspective, see Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), especially Ch. 8.
5. Since Martí was influenced by stoicism, and the Stoics embraced the concept of natural law as a universal valid rule applicable to all persons, it is reasonable to assume that he was likewise influenced by this concept. This being so, it can be plausibly argued that Marti was sympathetic to the notion of natural rights. For the influence of stoicism and natural law on Marti, see Medardo Vitier, Las Ideas y la Filosofia en Cuba (Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1970), pp. 178-188.
6. Our America, pp. 87-90. The conflict between oppressor and oppressed can be understood in a narrow or in a broad sense. Unlike Martí, those who conceive this conflict in the narrow sense attempt to explain it as an opposition between the haves and the have-nots. For Martí, however, the conflict is conceived primarily as cultural and consequently political. To say that someone (a people) is oppressed is to say that the oppressor (those who have power over them) force upon the oppressed a cultural and/or political state of affairs that (1) they have not voluntarily chosen, and (2) it is not in their best interest to choose so.
A Republican Perspective on Nationalism and Internationalism
Mortimer Sellers
University of Baltimore
My perspective on nationalism and internationalism will be republican, by which I mean a perspective informed by the republican ideas that animated the French and American revolutions, deriving from the Roman tradition of Livy, Tacitus, and above all Cicero. The fundamental insights of the republican tradition have been that states exist to serve justice and the common good of society, and that justice and the common good may best be found through popular sovereignty and public deliberation about the proper province of collective action. Republics find their own truths, and decide for themselves which forms of human flourishing to promote. This runs somewhat counter to contemporary liberal and democratic theory, inasmuch as liberalism focuses on individuals, not groups, and democracy derives legal validity from what people want, rather than what they think that they should have.
But in fact both modern democracy and liberalism grew out of the European republican tradition, during the English, American and French revolutions. The concept of human rights and their political elaboration also first advanced and took hold through the English settlement of 1689, the American constitution of 1776, and finally the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. This last document is very revealing, because it was only as citizens, traditionally, that republicans had rights at all. Liberty, the central concept in republican legal discourse, implied citizenship, and citizenship implied rights. But these rights could only emerge in the context of a political community. Republicans have always insisted that human good and justice cannot exist without community. So republicanism gave birth both to modern liberalism and democracy, but recognizes that there can be no liberty without community, or value to democracy, unless it serves a common good.
The concept of civic community provides a natural model for international community—and once again, it was republicans who first developed and promoted the modern concept of international community and law. Rouseau and Kant both advanced projects for a federation of republics, and perpetual peace. But in a Europe dominated by predatory monarchies and despotisms, Vattel sensibly promoted a world order that stressed national autonomy, to the possible detriment of municipal justice and human rights. This is the foundation of modern international law. Common good requires cultural community, but cultural community can lead to local intolerance and persecution. The central dilemma for modern republicans is the proper demarcation between the national and international communities. To put this in terms of contemporary international institutions, I believe that the solution to the republican dilemma lies in the interface between self-determination and universal human rights.
Republican self-determination requires popular sovereignty and elections, structured to serve the common good. Collective persecution becomes less likely, as Madison observed, when the deliberating group gets larger and more diverse. The idea of a common good promotes small communities and homogeneity, while justice may require numerous participants, and cultural diversity. So a modern theory of republican community would best locate rights-protecting institutions at the international level, while leaving culture-promoting activities to be more locally determined. But the international role would depend on all the players being democracies. Otherwise republican ideals would still be better served by Vattel’s old system of rigid state sovereignty, freeing self-determining peoples from the interference and corruption of self-interested despots and their diplomatic accomplices.
Related Writings by Mortimer Sellers
American Republicanism: Roman Ideology in the United States Constitution (Macmillan, NYU Press, 1994)
A New World Order: Sovereignty, Human Rights, and the Self-Determination of Peoples (editor) (to appear Berg, 1995)
“Republican Theory” in Christopher B. Gray, ed. The Philosophy of Law: An Encyclopedia (to appear, Garland, 1996)
“Republican Liberty” in Gabriel Moens and Suri Ratnapala, eds., The Jurisprudence of Liberty (to appear, Butterworths, 1995)
“The Actual Validity of Law” in 37 American Journal of Jurisprudence 283 (1992)
“Republican Authority” in 5 Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 275 (1992)
“Republican Impartiality” in 11 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 273 (1991)
At Home in Philosophy
Francis P. Crawley
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Last year, 1994, marked the fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (the night of November 8-9, 1989), that icon of a barrier, a no-man’s land, separating one people (ein Volk) of one city, one language, one cultural heritage—divided into two nations. It is appropriate that in the wake of this political upheaval, philosophy turn its attention to the idea of a nation and how bridges between nations can be built. The circumstances in which we live force us to ask anew, What is the relationship between philosophy and the politics of national identity? What perspective might philosophy offer us on the politics of nationhood? In this short piece, I want to address only one aspect—a key aspect—of this question: From whence this perspective? This paper will address the specific location, locus, of philosophy in society. It concerns that place, that situation, wherein philosophy takes its point of view. By gaining a clearer insight into the location of philosophy in society, we can perhaps better understand its relationship to politics.
Since the time of the pre-Socratics, philosophy has held a marginal place in society; it has existed on the brink of an abyss, on the fault line between rationality and nihilism, between what can be said meaningfully and what needs to be passed over in silence. When the early universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries wrestled the power of the studium away from the monasteries and the bishops, philosophy found a home in a place distinctively set apart in society. The universities provided a place somewhat removed from the immediacy of economic exchange, political urgency, and church authority. The universities established an independent place of reflection. Since that time the university has acted as the place for sheltering and protecting the interests of those who “have made themselves exiles for the love of knowledge” (Emperor Frederick I Authentica Habita, 1158).
With its interest in pursuing and passing on knowledge, the university took on the role of providing society with a perspective on truth. Truth—first absolute and then certain—was independent of the contingencies of everyday life, of the transitiveness of market exchange, and of the instability of political institutions and regimes. Although not a discipline within the original curriculum of the universities, philosophy soon established itself as the academic discipline par excellence, that discipline focused on a science of truth in all its purity. Indeed, since the fourteenth century, philosophy has never had any significant existence outside the community of scholars in the universities. Of all the disciplines practiced in the university, it is only philosophy whose very existence is dependent upon the university itself. Only in this place set apart, only in a realm within society and yet removed from the immediacy and demands of everyday life can the philosopher pursue her interests in scientia.
The repercussions of the fall of the Berlin Wall have been most immediately felt in the everyday lives of those who live east of the European Great Divide. Communism seemed to have run out of stock and liberal democracy (and its bedmate, capitalism) moved to establish their victory. However, the universities and the academics in Eastern Europe have reacted with some hesitancy. Certainly, there is general consensus on the bankruptcy of communism, on its proven inability to provide a rational and moral basis for a just society. But there is, at the same time, skepticism concerning the ability for Western models to fill the void. The universities in Eastern Europe have found a certain freedom in their loss of identity, and they are largely content not to flee unwittingly from the sufferings that loss brings with it.
West of the Divide we are also coming to terms with the loss of our counter-image. The universities, especially the European, are encountering questions that were largely unseen before liberal democracy was confronted with the demise of its foe. In the short term, the victory of the West appears unquestioned and unchallenged. Still the identity, the structure, and the curriculum of the universities are undergoing serious scrutiny and major challenges. The universities today are reacting to the impasses posed by the retreat of the political and moral ground of their societies.
Philosophy is essentially reflective, and thus descriptive. It loses its performative force when it attempts to act prescriptively. Philosophy is only at home in the homelessness of exile, in a place specifically set aside for reflection and the pursuit of an unadulterated scientia. The home of the philosopher is outside the immediacy of the competing demands and urgencies of the polis. In this sense the perspective of philosophy is always already international. However, it is not the internationalism of crossing from one national culture into that of another, of moving from the Volkssprache of one people to the cultural artifacts of another. Philosophy’s home, and thus its proper perspective, is in the place of a between: as Socrates reminds us in the proem of the Apology, even the philosopher who loves her city and identifies her activity most with increasing the good of the community cannot appear other than a foreigner among the other citizens.
As philosophers, our focus has for far too long been on the promise of absolute and certain truth. We have tended to ignore the situatedness of the origin of our reflections. As both the ground and the telos of our activity retreat, we would do well to reevaluate the place from whence our perspective(s) on the polis departs.
Multicultural Democracy and the Nation-State
Carol C. Gould
Stevens Institute of Technology
C R E A, École Polytechnique, C.N.R.S.
Introduction
A striking characteristic of the dynamics of current world politics is that there is movement in two opposite and conflicting directions. On the one hand, there is an intensification of global interconnectedness and interdependence among states and peoples and the development of supranational bodies; on the other hand, there is an increase in particularistic and separatist movements based on the growth of radical nationalism and religious fundamentalism, and a fragmentation of previous unities and alliances. This apparently paradoxical situation raises new questions for political philosophy. It requires a reconsideration of the traditional approaches to the concept of the nation-state, as well as an analysis of the import of these developments for existing democratic societies and also for the new polities that have emerged from the recent movements for democratization. In addition, it raises new questions about the justification of intervention.
In this paper, I will sketch some alternative conceptions of the nation-state in the context of globalization, particularly as such conceptions bear on questions of citizenship, national or cultural identity, and sovereignty. One may also note, without developing it in this brief discussion, that globalization has implications for the normative question of the justification of intervention in the internal affairs of one state by another state or group of states. Recent interventions and prospects of future intervention by international or supranational bodies require a rethinking of the analysis of these questions that was given in the 70's and 80's by Walzer, Luban, and others.1 In particular, the contemporary situation brings into focus the new question of who has the right to intervene and not only the question of what conditions justify intervention, which was the central concern in the earlier discussion.
The normative framework for this discussion is what I call cultural justice.2 This concerns the rights of ethnic groups to the expression and development of their own cultures within the framework of a different dominant culture, and more generally, the rights of individuals to cultural self-development. The premise here is that such rights are supported by the requirements of justice; that is, that individuals have a right to choose and to develop their distinctive ethnic identities on the basis of their equal right to self-development. The problem of the cultural rights of minority ethnic groups that exist within liberal democratic societies arises when a democratic majority takes its dominant culture and language to be obligatory and adopts assimilationist or integrationist policies that deny rights of cultural self-expression and development to such minority ethnic groups.
These issues suggest a range of hard questions for political philosophy. They concern conflicts between the values of respect for differences and the concurrent value of cultural autonomy on the one hand, and on the other, the universalistic values of equality and of individual or human rights. These hard questions require that we move beyond the current discussion that alternates between universalist and particular (or difference-oriented) frameworks.3
Globalization and fragmentation
Turning to the conflicting movements with which we began, we observe first the rapid development of globalization. This is characterized by growing interconnectedness and interdependence of national economies within the world economy, with respect to production, trade, finance, and labor markets, as well as the related universalization of technologies not only of production but of communication. Likewise, there has been a vast globalization of culture, primarily in the proliferation of Western and particularly American cultural modes, for example, in music, film, and dress, but also in greater access to diverse cultures worldwide, including non-Western ones. To some extent, we may also speak of political globalization, in two senses: first, the emergence of supranational regional bodies—most notably, the European Community—and second, the growing role of international bodies—especially the UN, both in terms of its peacekeeping and its monetary and financial functions.
In striking contrast to these phenomena of globalization, there has developed, particularly in the last decade, an increasing fragmentation and balkanization of formerly unified or federated states in Eastern Europe—the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia—and the continuation and exacerbation of tribal conflict and warfare, as well as intercultural and interreligious violence, for example, in Rwanda, South Africa, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Thus we observe movements in opposite directions as noted, on the one hand towards supervenient unities, and on the other, towards division and exclusion. Among these latter, two factors appear to be at work: the first is the upsurge of movements for political democracy and self-government (e.g., among the republics of the former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe); the second is the resurgence of nationalist movements for self-determination or autonomy on the part of nationalities and ethnic groups who had been assimilated or subordinated under previous regimes, but where these movements have too frequently taken chauvinist and brutally exclusionist directions.
These recent developments set a range of problems for political theory. With respect to globalization, these may be posed in the form of several questions: 1) What is the relation of globalization and the formation of supranational bodies to democracy? Specifically, what form of democratic accountability, if any, do such supranational entities as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank or similar international agencies have to the constituent peoples in the countries affected by them? Or are these global institutions bureaucratic or technocratic entities which function autonomously, independent of the political processes of democracy? 2) What legitimates the authority of decision-making by supranational bodies when such decisions impinge on the sovereignty of existing nation-states? Do the agreements to set up regional or global agencies by member-states for the purposes of economic, political, military, or cultural cooperation signify a surrender of national sovereignty by the constituent nation-states or a ceding of democratic control to a supervenient body? 3) What effect does globalization have upon the emerging democracies or developing nations which are highly dependent economically and unstable politically? Are these capital-deficient and economically transitional states vulnerable to external control and manipulation by supranational bodies or in a different way by multinational corporations? Does this in effect undermine internal democratic practices and the authority of democratic decision-making?
In the context of this development of globalization, a normative issue for democratic theory is how to effect democratic control of supranational bodies.4 The premise is that there ought to be such control but the question remains of how such participation could be even remotely feasible with respect to global bodies for which there are no correlate political constituencies practically speaking.
Alternatively, one could conceive of a more direct mode of democratic accountability of global institutions that would be based on something like world citizenship, on an extranational basis. But this is implausible, certainly in the near term, and it is questionable whether it would be desirable if it entailed an abandonment of the diversity of political communities.
The major transformations discussed above—globalization, the breakup of the Soviet Empire and the movement for democratization, and the reemergence of nationalism—all put in question traditional conceptions of the nation-state. There is the obvious challenge to the sovereignty of nation-states if major aspects of their present autonomous authority were to be ceded to or invested in supranational bodies or associations of which they were members. The globalization of culture, to the degree to which it has entailed a certain homogenization, has tended to evoke a reaction in defense of various traditional national cultural identities. In a somewhat related way, the increased cosmopolitanism, resulting from the interchange of cultures, and especially among young people and among professionals who participate in a transnational universe of discourse (e.g., scientific, technological, and managerial personnel), has been coupled with often-repressive reassertions of local ethnic, nationalist, or religious particularisms.
Another impact of globalization, especially on advanced industrial nation-states, has been the establishment of immigrant minority cultures or nationalities in the midst of the dominant national culture due to the needs of the labor market in globally interdependent economies. Just as corporations and capital flows have ignored national boundaries, so too, though in less fluid ways, has the labor force begun to distribute itself in supranational ways. The presence within these national economies of such immigrant groups has raised new questions about the relation of citizenship in a state to cultural, national, and ethnic identity.
What then becomes of the concept of the nation-state in these contexts, with respect to such traditional features as sovereignty, the identity of state and nationality, the rights of cultural minorities and the concept of self-determination?
Nationality, culture, and state
The term nation-state already bears within it an ambiguity. It seems to combine in some essential connection the elements of nationality in a sense that connotes ethnic or cultural identity with the notion of a polity or political entity within the boundaries of a certain territory. In short, the concept of the nation-state places both national culture and political authority within the same borders. It even seems to suggest that citizenship in a state is coterminus with national or ethnic identity. While there is a certain ambiguity in the meanings of the terms nation and nationality, it is nonetheless the case that most nations have made the claim to be based on nationality or ethnicity, usually identified as well with a language and a culture. (I will return later to a somewhat different use of the term nation, not essentially tied to the notions of nationality and ethnicity.)
The assimilation of state and nation is problematic on several counts. In the first place, it is in no way entailed by the definition or the functions of a state that its members have to be of a particular nationality. The exercise of political authority, participation in political processes and in the duties of citizenship, the defense and security functions of the state, its role in economic life, do not depend upon the nationality characteristics of its citizens. Further, the association of state and nationality is a historically contingent fact where it exists and in the case of the major modern states, it is largely a fiction or a political myth that these states are or were homogeneous in nationality. In addition, where state and nation are identified with each other, it has often given rise to the subordination and even forced assimilation of minority ethnic or cultural groups, whether these are historically resident in the state (or even native to it) or are the result of recent immigration.
These considerations raise the issue of citizenship or who counts as a member of the political community. In the context of this discussion, the two alternative conceptions of citizenship may roughly be characterized as universalistic or particularistic. What is universal about the first conception is that the status of citizenship is open to all those members of the population who undertake to fulfill the obligations and duties of citizenship and are competent to exercise its functions. This abstractly universal conception of citizens defines them independently of any requirements of ethnicity, nationality, or religion. By contrast, the particularistic conception of citizenship identifies characteristics of ethnicity or nationality as qualifications for membership in the state. These characteristics usually connote conditions deriving from kinship or birth and hence as “given” or in some vague sense as “natural.” The term cultural is more complex, since it is sometimes used in a similar way to these others but also connotes an intentionalistic identification with certain modes of life or practices. In the latter sense, cultural identity is not necessarily given but may be chosen or in any case may be acquired or ascribed independently of kinship or birth.
Reflecting on the role not only of ethnicity or nationality but also of culture in the characterization of a state, we may distinguish five alternative models of the state:
1) The purely political or universally abstract model of statehood, which is defined entirely independently of any condition of or relation to ethnicity, nationality, or culture. In such a neutral state, ethnic or other such differences may exist but they are irrelevant to the definition of the state as a polity or the political community and are assigned to the private sphere.
2) The multicultural state, in which a diversity of cultures exists and is recognized in various ways by the state. These cultural differences are not only tolerated but supported by the state, though they are not requirements for citizenship, which is defined apart from them. Such cultural affiliations do not bear any essential relation to ethnicity or nationality in the strong senses indicated above.
3) The monocultural integrationist state, in which there is a dominant statewide (and in that sense national) culture, in which all citizens are required to participate, but which is open to anyone regardless of their particular ethnic, national, or cultural affiliations. In this case, the different cultural, ethnic, or national identities are tolerated as pertaining to matters of private preference, but integration within the state requires the adoption of its official or national culture.
4) The binational or multinational state, which combines two or more well-defined nationalities within a single political entity. Here there is formal recognition of ethnic or national affiliation and specific rights are given to each of the constitutive nationalities with respect to certain areas of state law and policy. This case also involves the formal recognition of two or more official languages. 5) The nationalist state, which, in its strongest version, makes a particular ethnicity or nationality a condition for citizenship and thus for full political rights. Such a state is exclusively national in that it makes no provision for the equal treatment of minority ethnic, national, or cultural groups and regards them at best as resident aliens or denies them rights to reside there altogether.
When considered from the standpoint of cultural minorities within the state, the fifth model is clearly normatively unacceptable and so in most formulations is the fourth. The crude, exclusive nationalism of the fifth by definition leaves no scope for equal rights for members of cultural or ethnic minorities within it. The best that one could have on this model would be democracy for the right kind of people, but even this is highly unlikely given the authoritarian bent of most nationalistic regimes. The fourth model is more complicated, since it provides for representation and cultural self-determination for a set of different cultural groups. Nevertheless, there will certainly be minority cultures within a binational or multinational state who are not included among these nationalities or ethnicities. Therefore, despite the attempt to represent cultural variety in the context of political equality, some will inevitably be excluded and thus will be discriminated against, in terms of the expression of their culture, even if they possess equal rights as individuals.
The third model, of monocultural integrationism, despite its toleration of minority nationalities and cultures outside the political domain, still has a coercive dimension, in its imposition of the official national culture as a requirement for citizenship. This national culture also tends to be the culture of the majority, so that even with fully democratic procedures of majority rule, minority cultures could have their interests subordinated by the votes of a permanent majority. Interestingly enough, the first model of the neutral state is open to a similar problem in practice, with respect to the dominance of permanent cultural majorities. Although in this case there is no explicit imposition of acceptance of the dominant culture, democratic majorities may still deny equal treatment to cultural, ethnic, or national minorities by discriminatory allocation of resources or the adoption of policies that privilege members of the cultural majority in public life.
In terms of the protection of rights of cultural minorities, the second model, namely that of multicultural democracy or cultural pluralism, which is presently in its nascent form, is normatively the most acceptable. While it shares with the first the priority of a framework of equal individual and political rights, it promises to offer greater protection for minority cultures by explicitly building in support for a diversity of cultural expression and development. It also differs from the other models in providing for the facilitation and encouragement of interrelations among different cultures, thus making possible a richer cultural environment for citizens.
Earlier, I had suggested the separation of the concept of state from that of nation, where nation is understood as bound to particular nationalities or ethnicities. I favored instead the notion of culture, inasmuch as it connotes a more intentionalistic phenomenon, in which historical traditions and practices, as well as relations with others within the culture, are subject to appropriation and transformation, in a way that is not connoted by the more objectivistic and “natural” concepts of ethnicity and nationality.
However, there is another use of the terms nation and national that is not bound to nationality or ethnicity in this way. In reflecting on the complex entity that we may call political community, we may observe that there is not only the state with its government, citizens, rights and laws, but also the community that constitutes it and whose members recognize themselves as belonging to it. This community can be referred to as a nation. It usually also entails a recognition by its members of a common history, and an inherited set of traditions, as well as a common economic and social life. Moreover, the members of a nation most often live together within a common territory which is identified with the boundaries of the state. As understood here, then, the nation is a different aspect of the same entity as the state, namely, that aspect that designates the community of which the state constitutes the political organization and the legal framework for the rights and duties of citizens.
The ambiguity in the use of the terms nation and national discussed earlier carries over to the frequently used concept of the self-determination of nations. That is, it is unclear whether the claimed right of self-determination of nations resides with nationalities or ethnic groups on the one hand or with the political community (that is, the state and its community) on the other. My discussion suggests that the ambiguity should be resolved in favor of the latter, so that national self-determination, where this is held to pertain to rights to independent political statehood and to nonintervention, is not to be understood as a right of nationalities or ethnic groups as such, but rather of political communities.5
Having said this, however, we may need to introduce a qualification in applied contexts. Though it remains the case normatively that nationalities have no inherent claim to rights of self-determination (contrary to the views of Raz and Margalit6), in the near term and under specific conditions one can argue that a severely oppressed nationality would have a valid claim to self-determination as a state, provided it respected the equal rights of minority cultures within such a new state. This would be justified if statehood were the only way to protect its members from severe oppression or the danger of annihilation.
In conclusion, then, the dual phenomena of globalization and the assertion of national, ethnic, and cultural differences frame a series of traditional issues in political philosophy in a new way. These developments pose sharp difficulties for the nation-state but also open opportunities for rethinking it.
Endnotes
1. Cf. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977); David Luban, “Just War and Human Rights,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 9, no. 2; and Gerald Doppelt, “Walzer’s Theory of Morality in International Relations,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 8, no. 1.
2. See my “Cultural Justice and the Limits of Difference,” (unpublished paper, presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Value Inquiry, American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, 1994); and my “Hard Questions in Democratic Theory: When Justice and Democracy Conflict,” Working Paper, number 5 (The University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, March, 1994).
3. I have argued elsewhere that each pole of these dichotomies, taken by itself, is one-sided and inadequate. Cf. Carol C. Gould, “Philosophical Dichotomies and Feminist Thought: Towards a Critical Feminism,” in Herta Nagl, ed., Feministische Philosophie, Wiener Reihe, Band 4 (Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1990), pp. 184-190; and “Feminism and Democratic Community Revisited,” in Democratic Community: NOMOS XXXV (New York: New York University Press, 1993), pp. 396-413. Also see the earlier discussion in my “The Woman Question: Philosophy of Liberation and the Liberation of Philosophy,” The Philosophical Forum Volume V, nos. 1-2 (Fall-Winter, 1973-74), pp. 25-31; and Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economy, and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. chapters 1 and 5.
4. I discuss these questions at greater length in my “Supranational Bodies, Democratic States, and the Problem of Intervention” (unpublished paper presented at the Nobel Symposium on “Democracy’s Victory and Crisis,” Uppsala, Sweden, 1994).
5. Cf. Omar Dahbour, “Self-Determination in Political Philosophy and International Law,” History of European Ideas, Vol. 16, no. 4-6, (1993) pp. 879-884.
6. Joseph Raz and Avishai Margalit, “National Self-Determination,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 87, no. 9 (September, 1990), pp. 439-461.
Announcements
1. Future APA Sessions. The CIC will continue sponsoring formal sessions in divisional meetings. These symposia feature philosophers as practiced abroad, and/or topic of international significance. Future events are the following.
a. Symposium: “Israel and Palestine in the Context of a Just Peace: Alternative Concepts of Development,” APA Eastern Division Meeting, New York, December 27-30, 1995 (Co-sponsored by the International Development Ethics Association).
Chair: David A. Crocker, Institute for Philosophy and
Public Policy, University of Maryland
Speakers: Avishai Margalit, Hebrew University, Jerusalem,
Israel
Sari Nusseibeh, Birzeit University, West Bank, Israel
Jerome M. Segal, Institute for Philosophy and
Public Policy, University of Maryland
b. International Open Forum: “Is Philosophy a Luxury in Developing Countries?” APA Eastern Division Meeting, New York, December 27-30, 1995.
Chair: Olufemi Taiwo, Philosophy Department, Loyola University, Chicago
Call for Papers: The CIC will sponsor this session as a part of its series of “international open forums.” U.S. philosophers and philosophers from abroad will make brief (5 minute) informal presentations concerning the topic “Is Philosophy a Luxury in Developing Countries?” The meeting will be that of a round table rather than a panel or lecture. Philosophers, whether U.S. or foreign, interested in making a presentation should communicate with David A. Crocker by November 15, 1995. (Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. Phone (301)405-4763; Fax (301)314-9346; E-mail: <dcrocker@puafmail.umd.edu.>)
c. Symposium: “South-South Relations and Development,” APA Pacific Division Meeting, Seattle, WA, April 3-6, 1996.
Chair: Ricardo Gomez
2. International Conferences.
a. XX World Congress of Philosophy. FISP’s XX World Congress of Philosophy will be held in Boston, Massachusetts in 1998. The APA, together with several other U.S. philosophical organizations, is the “host institution.” Representatives from the APA and other organizations constitute the “American Organizing Committee.” This Committee is working with the local co-chairs, Robert Neville, Jaakko Hintikka, and Alan Olson (executive director) of Boston University.
b. Call for Papers: Fourth International Conference on Ethics and Development: “Globalization, Self-Determination, and Justice in Development,” Madras, India, January 2-9, 1997.
The International Development Ethics Association (IDEA) is a cross-cultural network of philosophers, academics in other disciplines, and development policy-makers and practitioners who apply ethical reflection to global, national and local development goals and strategies and to the relations between rich and poor countries.
Within the general framework of ethics in relation to development, this conference will focus on the tensions between current patterns of globalization, aspirations with respect to national, intermediate and local self-determination, and social justice. Social justice refers not merely to material goods, but also to the resources of nature, to community supports, to participation in decision-making, and to a sense of identity. The specific sub-themes are:
1. Globalization and national self-determination: types of globalization; the distributive, environmental, cultural, and political consequences of economic globalization (with particular attention to India’s liberalization) and their ethical evaluation; the moral significance of state sovereignty; the moral significance of environmental management, human rights, and humanitarian intervention.
2. Concepts of development: globally hegemonic, culturally rooted, and universalizable conceptions and their philosophical foundations (Ghandian and Green perspectives are particularly invited).
3. Globalization, environmental sustainability and justice: the implications of international trade, debt and capital movements for environmentally sustainable resource use and for local livelihoods.
4. Communal identities, social justice and democracy: the effects of economic globalization and socio-economic development strategies on religious, ethnic and status identities; the ethics of communal self-assertion and of tolerance; collectivities of gender, class, caste, religion, and ethnicity (incl. indigenous people or adivasi) and social justice; state policies in relation to structural injustices; communal and national self-determination and universal human rights; the empowerment of disadvantaged groups and the role of outside NGO’s.
5. Development obligations of the global North: international justice regarding aid, trade, capital movements, migration, restraints on resource use and pollution, etc.; the ethics of various kinds of aid conditionally, such as economic efficiency, environmental sustainability, or human rights.
6. The role of development ethics in power politics: the significance of development ethics in international relations and in national political economy, given that both are shaped by the exercise of power; the responsiveness of political processes to ethical considerations or ethically motivated pressures.
7. Development experiences: with respect to the above themes as well as to development successes and failures, particularly in South Asia.
Send abstract to Professor Peter Penz, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada; Fax (416) 736-5679; E-mail: <es_ppenz@ orion.yorku.ca>. Round 5 deadline is December 15 (decision by January 30, 1996); round 6 deadline is April 15 (decision by June 15, 1996); and round 7 deadline is June 30 (decision by August 30, 1996);
3. Fund for Assistance of Overseas Philosophers. This fund has provided a small number of complimentary memberships in the APA for philosophers in countries in which currency restrictions or economic conditions make payment of dues impossible (see Proceedings Vol. 66, No. 1, p. 8). Those who feel they meet the requirements for complimentary international membership should contact the National Office, in writing (APA, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, Attention: Janet Sample), to be considered. Memberships are evaluated according to the number of requests received and the amount of funds available.
4. Donated Equipment. The CIC encourages U.S. departments of philosophy to donate equipment that is new or used (but in good condition) to philosophy departments in countries and institutions undergoing financial duress. Especially useful would be computers, printers, copy machines, and faxes as well as typewriters and mimeograph machines. Once the equipment is donated the US department should investigate various methods of shipment. For some possibilities, contact David A. Crocker (see below).
III. COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
Suggestions for future symposia and other items to be considered by the CIC should be addressed to its chair, David A. Crocker (Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland; Phone (301)405-4763; Fax: (301)314-9346; E-mail: <dcrocker@puafmail.umd.edu>).