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"...
la mondialisation du monde (this is what I call in French the
worldisation, the worldwidisation of the world)
..."
Jacques Derrida
"A
world is precisely that, where there is room for all the
world: but really room, room that is really a place
that allows being there (in this world). Otherwise it is not 'world': it is 'globe'
or 'glome', it is a 'place of banishment' and a 'vale of
tears'."
Jean-Luc Nancy
"The
man without paper is a pariah, he has nowhere to feel at
home. He reveals clearly the inanity of our conception
of citizenship where the inclusion roads are crossing
the ones of exclusion. The users of this passage are
creating a common world."
from
the Declaration of
the Universal Embassy
1.
"Un autre monde est possible" ("Another
World is Possible") - this was the title of an
editorial in May 1998 by Ignacio Ramonet,
editor-in-chief of the monthly political journal Le
monde diplomatique. Since then, the sentence has
often been used as a battle cry and call for
mobilization, especially in the declarations of the
globalization-critical network ATTAC (which was just
forming then in May 1998, inspired by an earlier article
by Ramonet) and the World Social Forum initiated in 2001
in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
The
following text basically attempts to do none other than
to take this statement literally and decipher it in
terms of its possible meaning. What this involves is
less a discussion of concrete catalogues of measures
(introduction of the Tobin Tax, debt relief for the
most heavily indebted countries, etc.), which have been
proposed to create "a different world", than
of the question of how talking of a world,
a possible different
world, relates to the criticism of that which is
called globalization.
At the same time, this question is based on the assumption
that the statement "another world is possible"
is highly significant for the globalization-critical
movement as a whole - specifically because both the
themes and the forms of organization of this movement
obviously claim a dimension of world, or better: a dimension
of worldwideness, that is not necessarily identical with the dimension
of the global,
the so-called globalized
world or the world
of globalization.
The
question remains, which concept, which sense, which
symbolization of world does this movement refer to.
2.
In French there are two words for the concept of "globalization":
one is globalisation
(from Latin globus
= sphere) and the other mondialisation
(from Latin mundus
= world). Both are usually used synonymously (although
mondialisation
is by far more common). It is possible, however, that
the difference between the two words, despite their
common usage, could indicate a conceptual
difference or at least be fruitfully employed in this
way. With only a few exceptions, this conceptual difference
has hardly been taken into account. However, it indicates,
according to my thesis, a complex history, in which
the ideas and realities of the "world" and
the "global" have been closely interwoven,
yet were never identical. This is primarily the still
present history of modernity, a modernity that must
be taken as a problematic title. Several elements of
this history are to be outlined here.
One
objection seems to be obvious: does not engaging in
a reflection on the concept of world mean committing
oneself to a concept that is all too large, all too
general, a tired abstraction of concrete political problems
and struggles? To counter this, all I would like to
say directly is that the classical philosophical definitions
(as the "embodiment of all phenomena", etc.)
that would suggest a distrust of this kind are not only
based on an understanding of the concept of world as
a kind of ultimate generality, they also usually relate
it to an order of objects. In this way, they simultaneously
conceal a "different" history of modern ideas
of world, which relates to issues of intersubjectivity
and society. This is also and centrally, though rarely
addressed, a political
history and is as such worthy of reflection. The way
in which "world society" and "world public",
"world peace" and "world order"
are usually superficially talked about, is as much an
eloquent testimony to this history, as the obvious crises
of concepts such as "citizen of the world"
and "open to the world" can be understood
as an indication that the political perspectives formulated
in them are not afforded much of a future, possibly
also because of the aforementioned concealment.
It
is possible, however, that the problem of a "bad
generality" applies less to the idea of the world,
but rather to the idea of the "global" that
we have come to take for granted today - and perhaps
even certain ideas and practices of "globalization
criticism". A protest and initiative movement that
operates (also and according to its own self-understanding)
worldwide,
which opposes current globalization, will hardly be
able to avoid coming to agreements about the explicit
dimension
of its engagement in any case. One crux of the sentence
"un autre monde est possible" is, as trivial
as it may seem and as much as the formulation veils
it, that according to modern understanding - unlike
in the Christian concept of world - it can no longer
be related to any kind of escape from this world into another
world, neither in the religious nor in the "worldly"
sense - nor in the sense of a mental construction of
an "alternative world order". Taken as a political
concept at least, the modern concept of world designates
a radical immanence:
there is no "escape" from this world; all
there is - and Marx drew the revolutionary consequence
from this in his famous 11th Feuerbach thesis
- is the possibility and the necessity of changing it.
3.
For the present, there does not even appear to be sufficient
clarity about the globalization so frequently invoked,
about how protest actually relates to it. Certainly,
the protest is directed against neo-liberal globalization
policies - but are not the "worldwide" information
and communication networks through which it is organized
also part of globalization? In other words, are the
demonstrators actually against
globalization now, or are they for
it? If they are for
globalization - for a globalization that would meet
certain social demands, in any case - then which
globalization is it that they espouse? Which
globalization is it, conversely, that the protesters
and activists are against? Would it be sufficient to achieve certain social, political,
ecological (minimum) standards that check the "negative
effects" of a globalization that is desirable in
itself; or is that which is called globalization based
on a principle that generates such effects in a regular
way - by permanently circumventing existing standards,
seeking out their loopholes, shifting their purposes?
Finally, is that which is designated "globalization"
even something, with respect to which a position
either for or against it may be
taken? Or does this name designate more of a kind of
historical regularity that we are subject to, in other
words the inevitable historical truth of the world in
which we are situated?
Uncertainty
in the face of these questions is something that is
held in common: it applies not only to the actors of
the protests themselves, but also to the representatives
from politics and business that impel globalization
at their summits, and to the public that follows these
confrontations. Not least of all, it expresses a number
of conceptual attenuations that have permeated the self-designations
of the protests as well as their designations by others:
whereas two, three years ago there was usually talk
of an "anti-globalization movement" and "globalization
opponents", the latter have gradually turned into
"globalization critics"; consequently a call
was finally heard for a "different globalization",
and initiatives such as ATTAC have long since been labeled
"alter-mondialistes"
("alternative globalists") in the French-speaking
press.
What
weighs heavier, though, is that in this uncertainty,
globalization easily becomes a chimera, which accordingly
grounds an illusionary unity in the heterogeneity of
the protest. Developments such as the separation of
different demonstration marches (depending on political
concerns) and especially the failure of joint discussion
platforms
show that "heterogeneity" can also be a euphemism
for long smoldering resentments and insurmountable political
differences, indeed for the repetition of predominant
exclusions of certain political standpoints and interests
(that allegedly propound the same concerns). This is
regularly the case, for instance, when relief from the
negative social effects of globalization is sought,
particularly on the part of the unions, in the protection
and control functions of the historical nation-state
model, but without perceiving its constituent political,
legal exclusion of migrants, and without drawing the
consequences from this that the forms of the exploitation
of labor (whether in the countries of the so-called
Third World or in European countries) that contribute
to the current migration movements still frequently
correspond to a politics of "national interests"
under the conditions of globalization.
4.
In an article entitled "Globalisation ou mondialisation?",
the French philosopher Etienne Tassin
sharply contrasted the classical figure of the origin
of the economical, the household (Gr. oîkos),
with the dimension of a world:
"[...]
the world is not one world, nor is it a common world,
simply because of a common administration of the system
of needs (productions, exchange, consumption), and even
less so just because of identical consumer behavior. A
public space is political in that it is not economical.
Politics begins with the establishment of a relation to
what is outside the household, to the alien, who does
not enter into any account. It is namely only with this
relation that a world begins to unfold - instead of a
house, even if it is a common house."
The
neo-liberal dynamic of privatization, on the other hand,
is actuating "the systematic elimination of public
offices [...], which guarantee activities other than
production/consumption", and with this "the
disappearance of a common world", according to
Tassin. (It should be added to this that this elimination
of public offices, which serve the "establishment
of a human bond", is simultaneously accompanied
by the enlargement of security apparatuses, including
their own special interpretation of "public sphere".)
A
historical situation of the specifically "global",
however, does not suggest the Greek oîkos, but
rather primarily the second half of the 18th
century and thus the formational phase of the political
modern era: against the background of the increasing
constitution of the public sphere of the press, against
the background of a political theory that began, at
the latest with Kant, to explicitly develop a world
perspective, but also against the background of the
expeditions of Cook and Bougainville on the east coast
of Australia and in Oceania, with which the globe had,
around 1770, finally been completely explored, it was
at this time that the concept of the world and the concept
of the global both began to assume their concrete modern
form. And this form was such that both concepts were
categorically mixed: Kant, for instance, is thus able
to argue the "right of world citizenship"
to "general hospitality" with the law of "their
common possession of the surface of the earth, where,
as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence
must finally tolerate the presence of each other."
With a similar argumentation, Hegel would still be able
to write in the 1820s that North America has no relevance
for his philosophy of world history, because its "escape
from colonialization is, to a high degree, open",
so that it has no "need for a firm cohesion"
(yet) and thus there is also no "real state"
there.
In
both cases, it is the finitude
of the surface of the earth (as possible territory),
which - by enforcing a self-constrained state society
or society of world citizenship - opens up and simultaneously
conditions the legal or historical dimension of a world; the globe ultimately represents the epitome
of a finitude, within which the problem of the (common)
world actually:
only ever arises in all its severeness. Inversely,
it would be a matter, in Hegelian terms, of the Aufhebung of the reality of the global in a common world (that is,
of annulling it while at the same time preserving it,
or of preserving it while annulling it by raising it
to a new level).
5.
In his book "La création
du monde ou la mondialisation", Jean-Luc Nancy
points out the connotations of "accumulation"
that adhere to the concept of the "global",
which have largely been repressed in modern languages,
but which still live on in the conceptual double of
"globus" (= ball, lump, bunch), namely "glomus"
(= ball, knot, swelling, turgescence), and especially
in the word "agglomeration" (= massed together).
In light of these meanings, it is in fact difficult
not to think of the problematic of globalization:
Even
the modern era project of global colonialization, understood
as a political project, was not only and not primarily
an "escape" (Hegel) for those who were no
longer willing to "tolerate" (Kant) one another,
but most of all a project of domination and conquest,
the fundamental motivation for which was the amassing
of riches and the reality of which was the exploitation
of natural resources and human labor. The concrete historical
experience of globality can therefore not only be related
to the finitude of the surface of the earth, but rather
must be simultaneously grasped as an expression and
signification of a project of power, which is continued
both despite
and in the experience of the finitude of the globe. It is continued to
the same extent that this experience of finitude remains
exterior to it, because it is itself - in keeping with
a logic of accumulation, of "capitalization"
- in essence "without end" and in this sense
"infinite". What this involves, however, is,
in Hegel's words again, undoubtedly a bad
or negative
infinity; that is, the endlessly continued negation
of the finite, "which emerges again in the same
way",
which means a perpetual entanglement in a contradiction.
Taken
in this way, globality poses a central problem for political
modernity; however, it is a problem, on which this era
continues to labor more than it is able to find a solution. Perhaps the contemporary
word "globalization" expresses this problem
most aptly: the gesture of promise ("we will all
profit from it"), with which it appears, is all
the more hollow, the more it disguises that the same
globalization that allegedly propels growth, development
and prosperity "worldwide", also specifically
increases, or even produces, social inequality, new
conditions of exploitation and the dependencies of so-called
developing countries. And the proud insignias of its
existence and efficiency that this same globalization
parades - the progress of techno-science, the expansion
of communication technologies, worldwide networks of
information - when taken by themselves, only express
an indeterminate logic of capitalization (of goods,
instruments, images, information), the social value
of which is all the more dubious, the more precisely
these areas today find themselves increasingly determined
by unprecedented agglomerations
and accumulations of power, undermining not only fair
distribution but also the "balance" of information.
These
are the contradictions that unmask current globalization
as "bad infinity". And what is true in exactly
this sense of bad infinity is, to rephrase one of Kant's
famous statements, that we do not live in a globalized
age, but indeed in an age of globalization.
6.
"Can that which is called 'mondialisation' lead
to the emergence of a world, or does it lead to its
opposite?"
asks Jean-Luc Nancy at the start of his book. Are not
the articulations of the globalization-critical protest
the manifest political expression of this question,
the manifest political expression of an alarm, the reason
for which may be that the dynamic of globalization and
the political agency of its decision-makers specifically
does not take place within the horizon of this question? In comparison,
though, what could be the perspectives of a "mundialization"
that would actually be guided by the interest in a common
world? Or to put it differently, in relation to the
protest: Is there a world of anti-globalism?
First
of all, it is necessary to define exactly what is meant
by a "world". In this, I follow three of Jean-Luc
Nancy's general characterizations:
a)
What we call "world" does not belong to an
order of objectivity: "A world is never before me,
or else it is a different world from mine. Yet if it is
absolutely different, then I do not even know or hardly
recognize that it is a world, (...) As soon as a world
appears to me as world, I already share something of
it."
Nancy thus defines the world as a resonance
space, a manifestation space, which does not open up
before me, but
rather in which
I myself am manifest, in
which I participate, and the elements of which
mutually refer to and modulate one another in a certain
tonality.
b)
In precisely this sense, a world is characterized by the
fact that it is inhabited:
"Inhabiting, that necessarily means inhabiting a
world, which means having much more there than a mere
sojourn, but rather one's place (lieu)
in the strong sense of the term, which makes it possible
for something to take place (avoir lieu) in the proper sense."
According to Nancy, a world is thus "the
common place of an ensemble of places".
c)
The world - at least in the post-Christian understanding
of world - is a context of sense that refers to nothing,
which also means to no sense outside the world:
"(...) in the dimension of a world, sense refers to
nothing other than this world's possibility of
sense."
The fact that the sense of the world is in this way radically
immanent not only means that it cannot be grounded
in any final, virtually conclusive point, which would
grant the world a tangible shape of meaningfulness, but
also that it cannot be concluded or "fulfilled"
anywhere or in anyone in
this world; instead, sense circulates among those who
inhabit this world and participate in it. In this
circulation, however, the world is not only the possibility
of sense, but also experience,
"the experience that it has of itself" in fact.
I
think these definitions are significant for several
reasons: first of all, in a historical distinction from the Christian concept
of world that related the world as a "here below"
to a meaningfulness outside itself, they formulate a
modern concept of "world"; secondly, they allow this concept to become productive as a political
concept, specifically through a theoretical distinction
from the philosophical scientific concept of world,
which posits "world" as the epitome of the
objective; thirdly,
they separate the concept of world as
a political concept from the suggestive objectification
forms of world, not only those encountered in a Weltanschauung
("world view"), but also in all the ideas
of a "world order" to be erected on the basis
of objective or even social laws; fourthly,
and finally, Nancy's definitions establish a positive
concept of "world", which refers primarily
to issues of "intersubjectivity", of community,
of social conditions, and which in turn refers back
to the history of the political concept of world.
7.
It is primarily in Kant's political philosophy that
this political concept of world takes shape. In Kant's
political writing, world no longer means only (as in
the "Critique of Pure Reason") the "embodiment
of all phenomena" or the "totality of their
[objective] synthesis", but rather becomes a dimension,
in which Kant's reflections, particularly in relation
to "world citizenship" are located; it becomes
the sphere of general interest.
Nevertheless, it appears that reading Kant will not
take us far, to begin with, since this concept of world
is hardly given an explicit definition, but rather is
characterized by its reference to "mankind"
as a species, to which Kant's argumentations in his
philosophies of law and history refer. The concept of
the species of mankind thus seems to assert "world"
as a dimension of the political, but as a dimension
that has always already been given - naturally and through "moral law", which is, for
Kant, innate to man as a free being, so to speak. In
this way, the question, which is central here, of the
becoming of
this dimension is obscured.
In
addition, Kant's political philosophy appears in many
respects to be historically outdated: not only that
his notion of a constitution of world citizenship as
an order of peace among sovereign states based on international
law seems inadequate, where it is a matter of debating
political questions and conflicts arising from a transfer
of sovereignty (such as in the course of European integration)
or losses of sovereignty conditioned by globalization;
the same idea of a cosmopolitanism trimmed down to a
law of nations also hardly seems suitable to solve the
problems of today's refugees and migrants, who are simply
not covered by this kind of idea of law, and whose fates
drastically demonstrate the political insufficiency
of historical ideas of the legal order of (state) citizenship,
indeed even of the historical idea of human rights.
This
insufficiency, however, could itself be founded in the
Kantian gesture that relates "world" to the
- basically ahistorical - concept of the species of
mankind, thus understanding "world" as a pre-given
dimension of the political and drafting an "eternal"
legal order on this basis. It should not be overlooked
that the history of ideas of universal law (not only
Kant's, but also those of the French Revolution, the
American Revolution, or the ideas of law that were formulated
or taken up again after World War II) itself indicates
a becoming of the world, to the extent that these ideas
of law have allowed themselves to be used against
the "universalism" of existing legal orders,
where it proves itself to be a foundation for exclusion
and discrimination. Jacques Derrida, for instance, thus
rightly recalls the uncompleted significance of these
ideas of law and grasps them - in a gentle but essential
reinterpretation of the connection between "world"
and "man" and not without marking the problematic
of international law - as juridical
performatives that are indispensable in current
discussions:
"The
renewal and revision of the declaration of 'human rights'
(1948) and the introduction of the legal term 'crimes
against humanity' (1945) today demarcate the horizon of mondialisation
and international law that is supposed to be appointed
to watch over it."
It
remains to be asked, however, how
world can emerge
as a political dimension at all, which means as a dimension
that only becomes comprehensible as a dimension
of the political, in that it is concretely opened
and traversed. An answer to this question is to be found
in Kant's philosophy, where he investigates the possibility
of the "harmony between politics and morality";
this points unequivocally in one direction: to the function
and structure of publicity.
8.
The question of the compatibility of politics and morality
has to arise for Kant, because he posits morality and
politics as completely different spheres: whereas for
Kant the principles of the legal system proceed from
morality, politics is merely the "applied theory
of law"
according to the principles of state prudence. For Kant,
the latter is acting according to ends,
which serves communal well-being in the best case. Morality,
on the other hand, requires acting according to the
obligation
of the moral law of reason, specifically without regard
to possible advantages or this or that stated end. This
results, however, in the possibility of a "disharmony"
between morality and politics, namely when politics
disregards morality and begins to adapt it to its respective
ends. Politics should instead take the "principles
of state prudence" in such a way that "they
can coexist with morality". Therefore, according
to Kant, I can reasonably imagine "a moral politician
(...), but not a political moralist, who contrives morality
so that it is amenable to the advantage of the statesman."
As
a "mere idea
of reason", it is therefore necessary, in order
to establish harmony between politics and morality,
as Kant argues, "to obligate each law-maker so
that he makes his laws as though they could
have originated from the united will of a whole people,
and to regard each subject, insofar as he wants to be
a citizen, as though he has joined in the assent to
such a will".
This formulation nevertheless leaves open how an obligation
of this kind can be created for the law-maker, in other
words, how the compatibility of politics and morality
can be formulated not only as an idea of reason, but
could actually be included in the reality
of a legal system.
Indeed
it is exactly this role of the real
mediation of politics and morality that the principle of publicity assumes, specifically in both a negative and
a positive formulation. The former states: "All
actions relating to the right of other men are unjust
if their maxim is not consistent with publicity."
This principle - as the principle of public
law - is based on the understanding that a maxim
cannot be
lawful, "if I cannot publicly avow it without inevitably
exciting universal opposition to my project".
The positive formulation of the principle of publicity
states: "All maxims which stand in need of publicity in order not to fail their end, agree with
politics and right combined."
For maxims that can only attain their end through publicity
necessarily accord not only with right, but also with
"the public's universal end, happiness";
they thus correspond equally with morality and
politics.
9.
It is not at all necessary to agree with the Kantian
preconditions (of a general morality inspiring a possible
resolution of social antagonisms through a general system
of law or through a politics that meets with universal
accord),
in order to take up the crux of his concept of publicity:
namely that the concept of the public sphere here designates
precisely the principle, through which the actions of
law-giving power are arbitrated with the sphere of social
interests and reflection. It is only for this reason
ultimately understandable that publicity for Kant is
not only fixed as the principle of public law, but also,
in his famous essay on the Enlightenment, as the principle
of enlightenment,
which means in the context of Kant's philosophy: as
the principle of social and political change through
the public criticism of existing conditions (which Kant
restricts to the critique expressed by someone "as
a scholar", "as though he were a scholar",
through his "writings"). It is in this essay
that he says that making "public use" of reason
means nothing other than speaking "to the real
public, namely the world"
Here the world once again appears as a preconstituted
sphere, yet it is clearly related to an event
of social constitution: namely that of the Enlightenment
as "man's departure from his self-induced immaturity"
- consequently the principle of the emergence of a society
of mature citizens (both
male and female citizens - a notion that remained
largely inaccessible to Kant), the ultimate perspective
of which is the moralization of state and society from
a cosmopolitan point of view.
To
the same extent that Kant's moral philosophical premises
appear dubious, according to which the world represents
the pre-given horizon of intersubjectivity or a publicity,
the sole task of which is the redemption of the principles
of moral reason, the problem of social constitution
itself now shifts to the center of the question of the
connection between world and publicity. Both concepts
must be reformulated accordingly: the weak
concept of world, which imagines it as the mere horizon
of intersubjectivity or the societal respectively, must
be expanded by a strong concept that understands world as the actual dimension of social
conditions, actions and sufferings. It will then also
no longer be possible to relate this kind of strong
concept of world to abstract notions of "human
beings" or "mankind" as a species; the
human being is
his world, he does not exist outside a concretely political
world that is in a permanent state of constitution.
This is nowhere more clearly evident than in the policies
of humanitarian gestures that may be helpful in individual
cases, but are otherwise busy reproducing misery.
The
concept of publicity,
on the other hand, does not remain untouched by this:
it no longer designates the form of possible harmony
between politics and morality, but rather, to use Oskar
Negt and Alexander Kluge's term, the "organizational
form of social experience".
In our context this means the social constitution of
the social experience of world in confrontation with
certain coercive norms and exclusions. However, this
appends a material
element to the formal
concept of publicity, from which, not least of all,
the differentiation - also the formal differentiation
- of public spheres into plural publics is explained:
that of concrete social experience(s), which are articulated
in this differentiation. The mutual relationship between
these plural publics - also and especially in conflict,
in antagonism - is nevertheless not one of pure exteriority;
they are part of a constitutional event, the common
dimension of which is world.
10.
What is called globalization today seems to have little
to do with world in the sense set out here. On the contrary, globalization is
today also the name for a crisis of publicity, and specifically
both of public law and of the public sphere as a sphere
for negotiating social interests and experiences. It
is therefore not a coincidence that the globalization-critical
protest - symptomizing and marking this crisis - discharges
where it is thought that the political withholding of
publicity in this double sense is most likely to be
localized.
This
protest, however, to the extent that it is concerned
with the emergence of a "different" world,
an "anti-globalist" world, will not be able
to limit itself solely to the articulation of protest,
nor to schematic proposals for establishing an alternative
world order. A world public that is worthy of this name, will not be measured in
terms of competitive penetration into existing public
structures, but rather in terms of its capacity to be
defined by processes of constitution and social experiences
and to take part in these - the extent to which it is
capable of creating spaces and times, in which the articulations
of social experiences no longer take place alongside
one another, but rather enter into an exchange and conjoin
in truly new solidarities.
It
has often been pointed out that in the Kantian understanding
of publicity, the mechanisms of exclusion (between public
and private, between men and women, between property
owners and wageworkers) were already laid out, which
ultimately led to its historical refutation, in any
case to its historical unmasking as a bourgeois
concept, whose claim to universality is in fact
useful to particular interests, where it does not directly
serve them. Today it is again a matter of unmasking
the specific mechanisms of exclusion that are established
by public law and the public sphere in their current
crisis: this unmasking can only happen on the basis
of the experiences of the affected social groups; this
time it will have to apply especially to the exclusion
mechanisms of the citizenship concept of publicity on the basis on the experiences of
refugees and migrants in a world that seems to have
forgotten that that which is termed "globalization"
is not the only possible principle for changing it.
Translated
by Aileen Derieg
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