Abstract
This chapter revisits the debate between Chris Brown, Mark Hoffmann and the author on the state-centric view and cosmopolitanism that took place quarter of a century ago. It first explores whether similar deconstructions would anymore be possible. Second, it discusses Brown’s ideas about global civil society, democracy and justice, particularly in light of world-historical developments since the early 1990s. While Brown has tried to overcome the dichotomy between the state-centric view and cosmopolitanism, this chapter examines whether the idea of universal ethico-political learning and its cosmopolitan implications might explain the divergence in our practical judgements. The chapter concludes by arguing that any area of activities in international relations and world society can be subject to normative debates and potentially democratic politics.
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Notes
- 1.
The journal is now Global Society and is no longer edited by students.
- 2.
I do not mean to suggest to have influenced Brown’s development in any way. To my knowledge, he has never cited any of my works—not even in his contribution to the debate about the promises of critical realism (Brown 2007).
- 3.
John O’Neill (1998: 16) characterises liberalism as the view that public decisions and institutions are to be neutral between conceptions of the good. Individual liberalists maintain that the market economy and liberal state can be organised in such a way as to be neutral between different conceptions of the good, whereas communitarian liberalists argue that within a national state, conceptions of the good may converge, but among them pluralism must prevail. The assumption of neutrality is of course unfounded, because all institutional arrangements affect the conditions of good life (e.g. a subjectivist and competitive market society constitutes and constrains being like any institutional arrangement).
- 4.
This distinction is basically the same as the historical distinction between civilised and non-civilised. In my review of the Finnish translation of The Law of Peoples, I noted that Rawls’ theory is based on the European medieval just war theory and international law of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His outmoded attempt to defend these as a universal truth via the procedure of ‘original position of states’ is condemned to remain a historical curiosity (Patomäki 2007b). Moreover, neither Rawls nor Brown really tackle the simple but persuasive argument made by Charles Beitz (1979) that if society is an interwoven whole based on division of labour and cooperation, then we should be talking about global justice. Although I think Beitz is basically right about worldwide social cooperation, division of labour and relations of interdependency, human interconnectedness does not solely rest on the empirical indicators of the volume of transactions that flow across national borders but is much deeper and concerns our very social beingness (my discussion with Roy Bhaskar on this point is unfortunately available only in Finnish; Bhaskar and Patomäki 2006).
- 5.
Consider a legal dispute between two states. A criticises B by referring to a legal norm explicitly agreed by B (thus sticking to the hard evidence of state’s will and practice). B can contest not only the interpretation and applicability of this norm but maintain that this norm goes against its current will. A must then resort to a global-communitarian (cosmopolitan) line of argumentation and argue that B is objectively obliged to recognise the norm. The opposite is also true: if A starts from a cosmopolitan position, it necessarily ends up in citing state-will and state-practices. The preservation of the life and liberty of individual states contradicts the idea that the international (or global) community has its own moral or legal rules, norms and principles, and yet the latter is always necessarily presupposed. Thus, Koskenniemi (2005) claims that international law is indeterminate. As a consequence, the difference between, say, interventionist and non-interventionist position is illusory. You start with one position and end up arguing the opposite. Given the current institutional arrangements, Koskenniemi’s criticism of international law can be eye-opening, yet its adequacy is contingent, depending in particular on the prevailing transnational practices and global institutional arrangements. For a criticism of the Kennedy-Koskenniemi thesis, see Patomäki (2007a, b, c, especially 382–5).
- 6.
Jus ex bello is about the rules surrounding the termination of war. The question is: What constitutes the legitimate boundaries of the use of force, in terms of both the decision to end a war and the rules upon which this decision is based? A satisfactory answer requires, moreover that one can reflexively anticipate possible and likely futures. See Colonomos (2015).
- 7.
A powerful recent elucidation on this point is Sayer’s (2011) Why Things Matter to People. Social Science, Values and Ethical Life: ‘[W]e are sentient, evaluative beings: we don’t just think and interact but evaluate things, including the past and the future. We do so because, while we are capable and can flourish, we are also vulnerable and susceptible to various kinds of loss or harm; we can suffer.’
- 8.
See note 4. To my knowledge, the closest he gets to discuss these issues systematically is Chap. 7, ‘International Justice’, of his International Relations Theory. New Normative Approaches (Brown 1992, especially 174–77). Brown argues that Beitz’s points may apply to the OECD world, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the poor may be dependent on the rich, but the rich do not need the poor. Thus, there is no cooperation for mutual advantage. This is a dismissive statement, not a sustained argument based on any explicit criteria, analysis or evidence. Dependencies or benefits do not have to be symmetrical for a system to be based on cooperation. For instance, in the classical Marxist depiction of capitalist labour markets, there is an army of reserve labour. Thus, capitalists seem totally independent of any particular worker; and yet, without the workers the system of production would at once cease to function.
- 9.
Consider truth-claims first. The meaning of truth is correspondence to the way things really are in the world (veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus). Correspondence cannot, however, be used as a criterion of truth. Many centuries of attempts to explain what correspondence literally is have failed. Rather correspondence is a metaphor and truth should be seen as a normative and metaphorical principle, which guides conduct. In actual debates, we make truth-judgements on the basis of coherence, pragmatic and constructivist considerations and consensus. Coherence is important because beliefs form a system and coherence to evidence and other beliefs matters (thus, contradictions and aporias are so important for cognitive development). If an explanation or theory works in practice , we have pragmatic reasons to believe that it is in some important ways true (although our explanation of these reasons may be wrong). Constructivism (verum ipsum factum) applies to many things in society and we can create new social realities. As Habermas claims, also the norms of ideal speech situation and the actual beliefs held by the scientific community are relevant, although we also know that consensus can be wrong and in social sciences we rarely have a consensus. Mutatis mutandis, all these criteria are relevant in assessing moral validity-claims too. For instance, Rawls’s famous but also widely criticised ‘method of reflective equilibrium’ is a way of articulating the coherence-aspect of normative reasoning.
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Patomäki, H. (2019). Chris Brown’s Liberal Conservatism, the Process of Moral Learning and Global Institutional Transformations. In: Albert, M., Lang Jr., A. (eds) The Politics of International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93278-1_12
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