Rene — Comment on Derrida/Habermas Appeal — Europe and the global south: towards a circle of equality
Topic(s): Ethics.Politics | Comments Off on Rene — Comment on Derrida/Habermas Appeal — Europe and the global south: towards a circle of equalityEurope and the global south: towards a circle of equality
Iris Marion Young
20 – 8 – 2003
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-51-1438.jsp
In May 2003, leading European philosophers challenged Europe to formulate a coherent foreign policy in its own and the world’s interest. Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas and colleagues are well-intentioned but trapped in Eurocentrism, argues this American political philosopher. Europe needs not globalism but a provincialism that will enable a dialogue of equals with the rest of the world.
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In an important statement published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 31 May 2003, and co-signed by Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas calls upon European states and citizens to forge a common European foreign policy to balance the hegemonic power of the United States. Europeans should forge a common political identity to stand up to this hegemonic power, it argues, but an identity that is open toward ideas of cosmopolitan democracy.
I am grateful to these civic-minded philosophers for such a call to public responsibility at this historical moment when the United States and the United Kingdom seem ready to occupy Iraq indefinitely, and the US threatens other states. As an American, I welcome the call for Europe to be more independent of the United States in assessing its own interests and the interests of the world, and I agree that a united and different stance from Europe might temper the arrogance of US foreign policy.
I wonder, however, just how cosmopolitan the stance taken in the statement is. From the point of view of the rest of the world, and especially from the point of view of the US and people in the global south, this philosophers’ appeal may look more like a re-centring of Europe than the invocation of an inclusive global democracy.
15 February 2003: birth of a European public sphere?
Millions rallied to oppose war in Iraq… the coordinated simultaneity of these demonstrations, Jurgen Habermas suggests, that harbingers a European public sphere.
Millions rallied to oppose war in Iraq, in cities across Europe, including London, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin and Paris. It is the coordinated simultaneity of these demonstrations, Jurgen Habermas suggests, that harbingers a European public sphere.
Jurgen Habermas begins by citing 15 February 2003 as an historic day which may “go down in history as a sign for the birth of a European public sphere.” On that day, millions rallied to oppose war in Iraq in cities across Europe, including London, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin and Paris. It is the coordinated simultaneity of these demonstrations, Habermas suggests, that harbingers a European public sphere. But this interpretation distorts the historical facts.
On that same weekend there were mass demonstrations in cities on every other continent as well – in Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Manila, Vancouver, Toronto, Mexico City, Tegucigalpa, Sao Paulo, Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Istanbul, Warsaw, Moscow, and hundreds of other cities, including many in the United States.
According to people with whom I have spoken, the world-wide coordination of these demonstrations was planned at the third meeting of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in January 2003. This coordination may signal the emergence of a global public sphere, of which European publics are wings, but whose heart may lie in the southern hemisphere.
The philosophers’ appeal suggests that Europe has a special obligation at this historical moment to promote peace and justice through international law, against a US policy that rejects such internationalism. Europe must be the “locomotive” propelling the citizens of the world on their journey toward cosmopolitan democracy. Using the international institutions of the United Nations, economic summits such as G8 meetings, and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, the core states of Europe “should exert (their) influence in shaping the design for a coming global democracy.”
From the point of the world’s people, European confrontation with the United States may look like little more than sibling rivalry.
From the point of view of the world’s people, European confrontation with the United States may look like little more than sibling rivalry.
It is certainly true that Europe should exert its influence, especially against efforts by the United States to bypass or sever the thin threads of international connection that international policies have spun in the last half-century. However, this injunction to use public forums – the UN, WTO, IMF, and economic summits – conjures up the image of staged political contestations between advanced industrial states of the northern hemisphere.
In this scenario, most of the world’s people look on as North American and European rivals debate with one another; a few other countries occasionally entering the fray on one side or the other. From the point of view of most of the world’s people, Europe’s confrontation with the United States may look like little more than sibling rivalry. If the hegemony of the United States must be confronted and resisted, why not enlist the efforts of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as Europe, from the beginning?
In order for Europe to carry out its global mission as engine of the cosmopolitan train, Habermas says that Europeans must forge a stronger sense of European identity that transcends the parochialism of national identity. He argues that many of the institutions and values that originated in Europe – Christianity, capitalism, science, democracy and human rights – have proliferated beyond Europe.
A European identity for today can be culled from the distinctively reflexive way that European societies have responded to the problems generated by modernity, nationalism, and capitalist expansion. In the welfare state, Europeans have developed a solution to the inequalities generated by capitalism, and European states have managed to maintain the standards of welfare in the face of strong globalising economic pressures to change. Europeans have also already begun to put the aggressive dangers of nationalism behind them, by instituting the European Union. These successes can and should serve as exemplars to the world.
Europe: on behalf of, or with, the world?
The call to embrace a particularist European identity means constructing anew the distinction between insiders and outsiders.
The call to embrace a particularist European identity means constructing anew the distinction between insiders and outsiders.
A European identity, however, cannot exist unless there are others from whom it is differentiated. The call to embrace a particularist European identity, then, means constructing anew the distinction between insiders and outsiders. Habermas’s main concern is to distinguish a European identity from America. “For us, a president who opens his daily business with open prayer, and associates his significant decisions with a divine mission, is hard to imagine.”
Other others, in the east and south, stand in the shadows, perhaps, huddled at the edges of this playground where the big boys call each other names. Meanwhile, what of the other ‘within’? Is a European identity expansive enough to include the millions of children of Asian and African descent whose parents and grandparents have migrated to the metropole?
Like many Americans, many Europeans have reacted to recent global conflicts by distancing themselves from those they identify as foreigners. Surely invoking a European identity inhibits tolerance within and solidarity with those far away? Here I fear that Habermas may re-inscribe rather than transcend the logic of the nation-state for Europe.
In The Invention of America, Enrique Dussel retells the story of modernity as based on the European colonial project. Having spent centuries fighting Muslims and driving them eastward, and having discovered the treasures, power and technical innovation of the empires in distant Asia, Europe found itself on the edges of the world.
The European imagination invented America, Enrique Dussel argues, as a means of putting itself back at the centre.
The European imagination invented America, Enrique Dussel argues, as a means of putting itself back at the centre. Doesn’t the philosophers’ appeal – implying that Europe will stand between the power of the United States and the interests of an inclusive global order, tempering the former and offering leadership for the latter – look like an attempt to do the same for their own continent?
I agree that the hegemony of the United States should be confronted and resisted, and recent months have shown European peoples and states united in a resistance that has the potential to bring more balance to power. However, Europe cannot and should not engage in such confrontation on behalf of the rest of the peoples of the world, but with them.
The appeal for a European foreign policy ends by referring to a relationship between European countries and the global south: it recalls Europe’s imperial past. A century ago, the great European nations experienced the “bloom” of imperial power. Since then their power has declined and Europeans have experienced the “loss” of empire. This experience of decline, Habermas says, has allowed Europeans to become reflexive. “They could learn from the perspective of the defeated to perceive themselves in the dubious role of victors who are called to account for the violence of a forcible and uprooting process of modernisation.”
Europe: from privilege to province
In this reflection I hear Habermas invite his audience in their imaginations to adopt the perspective of formerly colonised others, learning to look at Europe and Europeans from that perspective. Certainly, engaging in such an exercise is better than self-absorption, a condition which might well be attributed to the United States and many Americans. But wouldn’t it be better to have real discussions with people and states of the south and east, on the sort of equal basis that might tell Europeans (and Americans) things they may not wish to hear about their biases and duties? For Europe, this is surely an issue of accountability.
Referring to colonialism and imperialism as an “uprooting process of modernisation” makes it sound as if colonialism is an unfortunate by-product of the otherwise universalistic and enlightened project, led by Europe to establish the principles of human rights, rule of law, and expanded productivity. Colonialism was not just a vicious process of modernisation, but a system of slavery and labour exploitation. What are the signs that European people and states have responded to a call for accountability with gestures of contrition and reparation?
As an American, I and others like me have a clear responsibility to resist the US government’s unilateral policies and to push for positive change. Citizens of European states have their own responsibilities toward their states and in the policies of the European Union. Rather than reposition Europe as a central player in global politics, the progressive project ought, in the phrase of Dipesh Chakabarty, to aim to provincialise Europe (as well as the United States).
Peoples from all parts of the globe, and especially from those parts whose people are most excluded and dominated by American and European led capital processes, ought to sit on terms of equality that recognise the particularity of each to work on solutions to global problems.
The forums where Habermas proposes that Europe might exert its influence against the current dangerous unilateralist thrust of US foreign policy all tend to privilege the global north and dominate the global south. The structure of the United Nations Security Council privileges the five permanent members; the constitutions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank give more power and influence to wealthy countries than to poor ones.
Many peoples of the southern hemisphere suffer the consequences of crushing debt and micro-economic coercion imposed by some of these international institutions, in the name of fiscal responsibility and the stabilisation of currency markets. Shouldn’t the project of cosmopolitan democracy include raising the question of the reform or even abolition of these institutions?
Global inequalities are not merely a legacy of colonialism, but result from ongoing structural processes that daily widen the gap between those with nothing and those living in privileged affluence. While even the poorest country has rich people, and affluent countries have poor people, most of those who can assume affluent comfort as a way of life dwell in North America and Europe. Without question, European countries do better than the United States in providing meaningful transfers to redress these inequalities. Even Europe’s generosity in this regard is pitifully low, however, and along with that of the United States, has been declining since 1990.
Towards a circle of equality
The privileges of wealth, social order, consumer comfort, well-developed infrastructure, strong capacity to finance government activity, and solidaristic culture, position European states and citizens well to take the lead in the project of strengthening international law and peaceful conflict resolution, and instituting mechanisms of global redistribution. Certainly they should exert influence to pressure, shame and encourage the United States and its citizens to join in this project.
We are taking no steps toward cosmopolitan democracy, however, if the many other peoples of the world do not have influential seats at a table that holds the powerful accountable to the poor and affords real influence to less affluent regions. The weekend of 15 February 2003 signalled a global public sphere that existed before then and has persisted. Many European and North American participants in global civil society look to activists from Brazil or Kenya or India or Sri Lanka for insight and leadership. A democratic European foreign policy would listen to those and other southern voices in a circle of equality across an empty centre.
The original version of this article was written for a panel on “North-South Dialogue,” at the World Congress of Philosophy in Istanbul , August 2003.