09 2002

World Wide World. Is There a World of Anti-Globalism?

Stefan Nowotny

Translated by Aileen Derieg

"... la mondialisation du monde (this is what I call in French the worldisation, the worldwidisation of the world) ..."

Jacques Derrida[1]

"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[2]

"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[3]

 

 

1. "Un autre monde est possible" ("Another World is Possible") - this was the title of an editorial in May 1998 by Ignacio Ramonet[4], 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 11^th Feuerbach thesis[5] - 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[6] 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[7] 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 18^th 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."[8] 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.[9]

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"[10], 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?"[11] 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."[12] 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."[13] According to Nancy, a world is thus "the common place of an ensemble of places".[14]

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."[15] 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.[16]

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.[17] 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.[18]

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."[19]

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"[20]; 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"[21] 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."[22]

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".[23] 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."[24] 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".[25] 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."[26] 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"[27]; 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)[28], 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"[29] 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.[30] 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"[31]. 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.