A WORLD that belongs to everyone and to no one is a world that must be conceived and governed with categories other than those applied to the nation-state. Must we abandon the idea of a world that is organized in accordance with democratic values and principles of justice or can we imagine democracy on a global scale? Is intervention in “other people’s” affairs legitimate or are we compelled to accept anything that is carried out in the name of sovereignty? Are there criteria for global justice or must we accept that justice is a value that only measures relationships within states? These three notions—democracy, humanism, justice—must be deliberated within a new context that can be synthetized in the belief that we need to move from sovereignty to responsibility.
DEMOCRACY BEYOND NATIONS
Let us presume, even though it may be presuming too much, that nations are democratic or that, at the very least, we know how democratic institutions are created and developed within the framework of the nation-state. What happens, then, when we talk about institutions beyond nations, such as the European Union or truly international institutions? In these arenas, is it possible and desirable for decisions to be made democratically or are we forced to surrender to the impossibility of such a task? Most importantly, what happens when the importance of the decisions that are made in these arenas that escape the limits of the nation-state increases?
We have a problem here, perhaps the most serious problem that humanity’s current political organizations are confronting. Globalization is depoliticized, that is, it flows without direction or in a nondemocratic direction, pushed by ungovernable processes or by unaccountable authorities. Numerous decisions are distanced from the space of democratic state responsibility, which complicates questions of legitimacy and acceptance. There are more and more intrusive politics that the public struggles to understand and accept (for example, military interventions that stem from the responsibility to protect people or the control of the economies of countries with which we share a common destiny). How are pressures on speculative markets, prohibitions against certain countries developing particular weapons, or European demands for budgetary austerity democratically justified? Who has the right to tell Greece, Syria, or Iran what they must do?
The problem becomes more serious as institutions that only weakly correspond to our criteria of democratic legitimation acquire growing importance. International institutions are essential for the solution of certain political problems, but they are structurally nondemocratic if we apply the criteria by which we measure the democratic quality of a nation-state. This set of circumstances immediately awakens a logical sense of dissatisfaction, as we can see from the high degree of indifference toward politics, local and global protests, hopelessness about politics’ ability to carry out authorized governmental tasks under current circumstances, and, more concretely, a lack of identification with international institutions and the European Union, which are especially vulnerable to populism.
Now, we have proof that those who are unsatisfied are not always right since some proposed solutions are even more unsatisfactory than the detected problems. Protests point in the right direction—transparency, participation, democratic control—but they are flawed when they are unable to imagine another form of legitimacy than could be used for spaces and decisions that are no longer in the arena of the nation-state and are very unlikely to return to this well-known territory. At the beginning of the failed Constitutional Treaty for Europe, there was a desire to end the “permissive consensus” and reactivate a politicization that could only come from explicit citizen approbation.
Considering this state of affairs, no one can be surprised that there is little identification with the process of European integration. It is accused of not fulfilling democratic demands that, apparently, member states satisfy perfectly. Both the Right and the Left are generally moving back toward a safe space, whether that is in relation to national identity or to social protection. Depending on their ideological sensibilities, people will be more concerned about one thing or another, but in any case, a return to old references and a general rejection of any form of political experimentation seem to be unavoidable.
This movement back toward known quantities was crystalized with the German Constitutional Court’s ruling on the Treaty of Lisbon of 2009, when national democracy was taken as the model to assess the legitimacy of the European Union, as if the court did not appreciate the institutional novelty represented by the Union. It demanded democratic control of power without taking into account the other side of the coin: achieving and safeguarding democracy now requires institutions capable of acting beyond the nation-state. The court also reclaimed German organizational control over European agencies. If something similar were done by the other member states, decisions would be blocked at the European level.
Jürgen Habermas wrote an article that principal European newspapers published in October 2011. His position was unmistakably federal, but the effects justify the return to the national arena. In it, he coined the phrase “postdemocratic Europe” to refer to the current situation of the European Union, which he believes is monopolized by elites and by market imperatives without democratic legitimation (Habermas 2011). The proliferation of “technological” or political governments that justify themselves with accounting criteria rather than with explicit democratic standing seemed to corroborate the accusation. Habermas’s way of thinking is tired: opaque elites versus democratic people, the system as opposed to the lifeworld. As if citizens knew exactly what needs to be done and how, while our political leaders do not know what to do and would not be capable of carrying it out.
Does this dilemma have a solution that is neither cynical nor populist? Is there a third way between technocracy and demagogy? Robert Dahl (1994) synthesized politics’ fundamental dilemma in the age of globalization as the contradiction between the effectiveness of the system and citizen participation. With this, he was referring to two fundamental types of legitimation in which to ground our institutions and political practices: the legitimacy that comes from popular support or accepting decisions based on democratic procedures (input legitimacy) and the legitimacy that is acquired from the capacity of securing public goods and resolving problems of economic globalization (output legitimacy).
It is true that the purely functional, apolitical justifications of international institutions and the European Union are insufficient (Zürn and Ecker-Ehrhardt 2012). It is not acceptable that the elites from a few countries, discounting national and global public opinions, condition the national politics of other countries. However, the impact of international political decisions on domestic spaces is not always an unjust intervention, but a reality that is ever more present and that requires legitimation. Something similar is taking place with the spread of technological criteria in current politics and even with “technocratic” governments. Technological competence is a fundamental requirement for good politics and not paying attention to it tends to activate a desperate call for efficiency as the last resort. These types of situations are most assuredly only justifiable under exceptional circumstances and in a provisional manner.
In any case, our democratic ideal would be completely illusory if we thought about it as a permanent plebiscite, without any delegation of any type, without other people’s interventions. If democracy could not be anything but popular and close, if it were unthinkable beyond the spaces and in matters for which self-determination is possible and desirable, then we could say goodbye to adventures beyond the nation-state and return—if this were possible—to simpler societies and to delimited spaces. Paradoxically this desertion would not help resolve global problems with better democratic criteria but would, quite simply, abandon them to their fate, which is as undemocratic as a situation can be.
Therefore, in the era of politics beyond national borders, of interdependence and networks, functional legitimation is bound to acquire greater importance regarding territorial representation. The political system has to respond to the expectation that we live in “societies that resolve problems” (Scharpf 1997). For this affirmation not to presume a desertion of the principles that rule our democratic societies, the emphasis on functionality demands a differentiation of scope because it cannot have the same weight on neighboring affairs as it does for global problems or in the temporal register of urgency as it does for constitutional provisions. The presence of disputed and seemingly contradictory principles is part of our political condition, but one must know how to adequately manage things based on the problem in question and the circumstances conditioning it.
In the current situation, we cannot progress toward necessary European federalization with any confidence in the support of inhabitants who do not understand the European structure, people who have been bombarded for years with protectionist speeches and who are now being served an image of Europe as a disciplinary agent at the service of the markets, without remembering the responsibilities we share and the mutual advantages we receive. We find the appeal to a sovereign people or the recourse to the criticism of our leaders intellectually and politically very comfortable. It makes us feel morally irreproachable as a member of the innocent crowd. Someone should remind us, however, that there would be no populist leaders if there were not populist peoples.
It is not terribly realistic to think about transposing the categories of nation-state democracies to processes like the European Union or especially to global governance. David Held suggests that if we want to talk about global democratization we need to be less strict with the criteria of democraticity than we tend to be when we talk about democratic states. It is reasonable to understand that in global processes “there is little room for democracy ... but a lot of space for legitimacy” (Willke 2007, 127).
From this perspective and with all these nuances, we should revise the platitude that democracy is only realizable within the framework of the nation-state. Schumpeter’s (1942) idea that the success of a democracy depends on not extending the range of political decision too far rests on past experience, but it seems to invite us to abandon current global processes for a way of thinking that is opposed to any idea of just government.
In the end, the problem is not whether global arenas do or do not allow for a democracy similar to the one that is configured in nation-states, but how to overcome the incongruence between social and political spaces. What is most essential is that there be legitimate government or governance and not whether democratic requirements that only serve, strictly speaking, for delimited spaces can be extended globally. In this sense, international institutions (as well as the European Union, which is not truly an international organization but something more intense) make it possible for politics to recover the capacity for action in the face of denationalized economic processes.
It is a mistake to think that the strengthening of the European Union and international institutions necessarily presupposes a threat to democracy. It is a question of understanding that the equilibrium between national, European, and international arenas is a challenge to extend democracy to new processes. Economic and social interdependence (especially in Europe) makes some parties’ decisions affect other parties in such a way that the mutualization of risks and even the intervention of other groups should be understood in the context of one’s own democratic responsibility. Sovereignty, which was previously a means of configuring democratic societies, currently only serves to find decision-making arenas that unite democratic efficacy and legitimacy once it is transformed and shared. In an interdependent world, we must shift from sovereignty as control to sovereignty as responsibility (Deng, Rothchild, and Zartman 1996). From this perspective, it is worth legitimizing intervention in spaces that sovereignty wants to consider exclusive. With all the guarantees that are necessary, the same argument that has been developed to confront violence should also be advanced when it is a question of economic risks that can have catastrophic consequences on people.
How do we manage to overcome these shortfalls when democratic decisions take place in the heart of political communities that are based on confidence and solidarity as long as there is no transnational political community?
In the face of those who believe, from a rather static position, that the problem is not so much the absence of kratos, but rather demos on a global level, experience tells us that international relations can create elements of a transnational demos as a result of the very dynamic of international institutions or intense transactions, in terms of solidarity, confidence, and the construction of shared memories (Zürn and Waiter-Drop 2011). This is, for example, revealed by recent European history. International institutions have moved, although still in a weak fashion, from a simple aggregate of interests to communities with increasingly shared destinies. For example, the demand for unanimity has been softened to majority decisions in institutions like the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank; there are many deliberative elements of shared sovereignty in the European Union, of course, but also in the International Criminal Court, the World Trade Organization, and even, to an extent, in the United Nations Security Council.
There is no doubt that there is a conflict between the normative principles of democracy and the effectiveness of politics to resolve some particularly weighty collective problems. But international institutions are part of the solution, no matter how difficult it is, not part of the problem. Not all obligations that we have assigned to the state can actually be carried out by it with the instruments of state sovereignty. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner we will begin to think and work on a new political configuration where there is a balance between democracy, legitimacy, and functionality.
TRANSNATIONAL HUMANISM
The international community’s very diverse military interventions, from Iraq to Libya, have generated intense debate. Those who highlight the contradiction of certain operations and the selective nature of those operations based on the interests of the major powers are not incorrect. It is true that intervening in other people’s affairs in the name of great principles is one of the most arbitrary practices of history. The power game offers stronger states the right to decide about the sovereignty of the others. Our international relations are created out of cynicism and self-interest, something that should come as no surprise at this point.
But it is useful to remember where the responsibility for these interventions comes from. On the one hand, the reality of our interdependence has given us new responsibilities; on the other hand, we know from Rwanda or Srebrenica that strictly humanitarian treatment of crises and disasters is completely ineffective when cruel massacres and the brutal repression of the most fundamental human rights are taking place. This experience has made humanitarian discourse abandon the logic of neutrality to enter into the logic of responsibility.
While human rights have helped establish state sovereignty, nowadays they condition and question it. Various centuries of establishing the rule of law and democracy have managed to deidealize the internal sovereignty of states; it is now a question of relativizing their interests regarding foreign politics (Badie 2002). If at other points in time, human rights relativized the interior politics of states, they currently point toward international relations: the great challenge of human rights is now the discovery of humanity beyond nations. The fact is that the establishment of the state has not been accompanied by an international order in accordance with laws, as if internal security were incompatible with external norms. Taking sovereignty seriously presupposed liberating ourselves from all previous or external normative obligations; international action would end up being a pure balance of power since every state would be fully in charge of its own actions in its own territory. It is this absolute nature of sovereignty that is questioned when we formulate the responsibility for intervention against those who undermine certain fundamental values. Humanity is slowly being imposed as a point of reference for international politics, pushing back against the idea of national sovereignty or corresponding interests.
We are experiencing the breaking point of the international order: the histories of bipolarity, ideological confrontations, and rival military powers are all finished, but it is also the end of a world understood as the juxtaposition of nation-states dedicated to competing among themselves or to coexisting in mutual indifference. Globalization has made interdependence into an active principle of the international game that directly questions the very idea of sovereignty.
Sovereignty is placed into question, in the first place, because of its ineffectiveness in a context of solid interdependence. Sovereignty is overcome by the emergence of new problems that cannot be tackled alone: ecology, the growing complexity of development, the contrasts provoked by globalization, the promotion of common goods like peace, health, food, or human rights. There are fewer and fewer issues that can be managed in the strict space of the sovereign, self-sufficient state. So the logic of aggregation tends almost inevitably to trap states, out of necessity, conformity, or pressure. States—which are responsible, whether actively or passively, voluntarily or involuntarily, skeptically or acceptingly, alone or with others—end up playing the game of interdependence and entering into agreements on common goods. In this way, the idea of sovereignty is opposed to the idea of responsibility. States are ever more responsible for the world order. Once faced with a contractual responsibility to their citizens, they now also carry a responsibility that commits them to the exterior regarding goods such as the environment, peace, and development.
In its traditional form, sovereignty evokes a seriousness that should, by definition, be elevated above mistakes, doubts, and misunderstandings. It is an ultimate power from which all authority is derived, the definitive argument that is opposed to pretensions or the criticism of others, the masterpiece of the ideology that authorizes all states to become an exclusive actor on the official international stage, a centralized power that acts as the supreme authority over a territory without being answerable to anyone else.
Even though it has been unmasked, considered an ambiguous, contradictory, or maladjusted fiction, sovereignty has not been abolished. Of course, it still has a mobilizing effect and functions as an appeal to authority. What it can no longer do is establish itself as something absolute; it is one principle among others that directly contradict it. It has probably never existed in an absolute form, probably always being violated in practice by other contradictory powers. No power exists in a void without other powers capable of acting upon it, contradicting it, and modifying it. Current normalcy implies limitations on sovereignty; the state finds itself obliged to act in ways that contradict the principle that establishes it, accepting the coexistence of actors who are beyond its sovereignty. The fact is that, in the end, the state loses more sovereignty than power. Sovereignty is subjected to the corrosive effect of interdependence. But power remains, even though it is modified; the capacity for action can even increase with the cooperation that allows the sovereign state to gain access to new resources and recover its specifically political function.
In addition to the reality of interdependence, the other great limiting principle of sovereignty is respect for human rights. The violation of these rights activates the interventional community’s responsibility to intervene. In the end, both principles are intertwined because what the generalized practice of intervention has precipitated is not an idealistic discovery of human rights, but the reality of our interdependence. This mutual dependence has given way to new scenarios of responsibility in which the demands for cooperation and for intervention increase: calling upon companies to invest and create employment, upon states to fulfill specific budgetary demands that do not harm society, upon international institutions to give aid or lend money, upon regional or global powers to reestablish security, and so on.
This is the context through which the United Nations formulates the principle of the “responsibility for protecting,” as a responsibility that accompanies, under certain conditions, the right to intervene. Sovereignty was saved or frozen by the Cold War. Outside threats implied that the power of states remained intact, at the expense of the most serious attacks on human rights. The Eastern and Western ideological blocs thought they could ignore fundamental human requirements in the name of the principle of nonintervention. Confronted by their rivals, they employed that principle for nothing but purely rhetorical purposes. But these circumstances have changed radically. A true international politics of human rights is possible when it is no longer serving the needs of bipolar rivalry. Other people’s human rights are increasingly a daily concern of international life, independent of ideological ascriptions, which no longer act as an excuse to allow intolerable situations.
International life is no longer summed up by a juxtaposition of sovereignties and a confrontation of powers. International or, better yet, transnational humanism is being forged little by little. There are already institutions capable of determining effective practices. The slow ascent of the principle of universal jurisdiction, the universalization of human rights, and the reinforcement of international integration are elements of good governance capable of tackling the dissemination of violence over the long haul.
There are many actors and networks that intervene to make the idea of humanity operative, competing with national interests and modifying the value and effectiveness of the classic resources for the exercise of power. At the same time, the reference to humanity has shifted from being a private discourse, belonging to institutions “without borders,” to being politicized to the extent that states confront new responsibilities, becoming a principle of international vigilance.
Of course, we cannot yet speak about the democratization of international life: there is still a lot of arbitrary state power. It is not the case that the international politics of human rights has replaced cynicism with morality or governments with NGOs. Humanity has been evoked everywhere and at every point in time, but in the world today, this reference has a new opportunity: transnational humanism consists in placing the demand for integration beyond unilateral advantages or persuading others that these advantages are precarious if they are not inscribed into a process of international integration.
GLOBAL JUSTICE
It is relatively easy to know what we are saying when we state that someone is just or unjust; it is more complicated when we apply this description to societies or countries, even more so if we affirm that the world is unjust. This last statement, however, is frequently asserted in our daily conversations. When we make it, we are not accusing any one person specifically; instead, we are referring to a structural situation of injustice. The world is not just or unjust like a state or person can be. Appealing to a structural situation of injustice means that we are talking about properties of the world’s being, which cannot be reduced to the injustice that can be attributed to concrete people, although structural injustices necessarily include the unjust actions of people.
For some people, talking about global justice is excessive; they prefer to talk about international justice, which presumes that they consider the nation-state as the correct context for justice. This primacy has dominated ideas about justice for a long time. But the dynamics of globalization have been eroding the model of international relations on the basis of some more or less independent states. For that reason, we cannot understand the consequences of climate change, the patenting of certain medications, the plundering of natural resources, the deregulation of financial markets, or hunger in the world as domestic affairs of states that are explained, justified, or managed within those state frameworks.
New realities are overpowering the approach of looking at justice within nations. I am referring to the bilevel liberal model according to which the definition and provision of justice are the responsibility of the state, while the international community should intervene in sovereign matters only in the case of serious violations of fundamental rights. The most sophisticated model in this regard is that of John Rawls who elaborates his theory of justice based on a scenario of autonomous states negotiating not global justice but foreign policy in special conferences (Rawls 1971, 1999). As his critics have pointed out, Rawls has developed a theory for the world that has broken down (Buchanan 2000). Julius (2006) wonders whether he has a current world map, and Fraser (1990) declares him inappropriate for a post-Westphalian world.
Talking about global justice—which is more radical than international justice—makes sense in an interdependent world that establishes communities beyond the state framework. One of the most banal consequences of globalization is that we are increasingly confronted with problems that affect humanity as a whole. Many problems concern us regardless of the place where we live: the means of communication and immigration bring the suffering of the world closer to us; climate change and the financial crisis have made it obvious that we live in a single world. Decisions that are adopted far from here affect us just the same. It is no exaggeration to affirm that the horizon of global experience is configuring a true “community of misery and suffering” (Höffe 1999, 20).
In this context, the theories of justice that depart from the principle that the obligations of justice are only useful for those who live in a political community or beneath a single constitution are useless. Given global dependence, the principles of justice that reign inside nations should apply on a global scale (Beitz 1979). There is also an international society where there is no political constitution, when there are, for example, communication and commerce that link human beings of the diverse areas of the world beyond national borders. Questions relating to justice do not only arise inside established legal systems. The demands for justice and the respect for human rights are also asserted in places where there are no sanctioning procedures. The obligations of justice emerge in social processes that connect people; political institutions are responses to these obligations rather than starting points (Young 2010, 329). The responsibilities of justice precede the institutions that channel them.
Questions of justice are increasingly posed on a global level, to the extent that the global level constitutes a political structure in which the vital opportunities of many human beings are decided, which permits or provokes manifest injustices. There are injustices that refer to global structures and require specific actions at that level. Let us think, for example, about the fact that commerce is regulated by a series of conventions that have positive and negative effects on diverse participants. We can illustrate this circumstance with the idea of “structural injustice,” according to which Iris Marion Young (2010) refers to a complex process in which diverse actors, rules, and practices participate. To illustrate this complexity, Young proposes replacing the metaphor of structure with that of a chain, for which responsibility cannot be conceived according to the principle of causality.
The fixation on a national framework does not allow for an understanding of the nature of the poverty in the world and the corresponding structure of responsibility. Rawls, for example, saw the causes of extreme poverty only in poor countries, because of their poor government or the lack of redistribution inside these societies. But, as Pogge (1989, 2001) has noted, the fact is that the current global order is configured on the basis of incentives and regulations that contribute to these situations of poverty. Poverty is explained not only by local causes but also by factors that have to do with the international order: protectionism that impedes the opening of markets in developing countries, patent agreements that impede the introduction of generic products in those countries, and so on. We must also keep in mind that the current state of poor countries is the result of a historic process that is in many cases marked by slavery, colonialism, and genocide. In summary, their poverty and our wealth are based on a common history.
Understanding this complex but real causality is essential in order to adequately focus the debate on poverty and the actions meant to combat it. We must remove global justice from space and from “humanitarian aid,” where there is a logic of donation that conceals the responsibility of the “benevolent states.” We are not facing the positive obligation of reducing suffering through humanitarian aid but the negative obligation of justice that requires that we change the current order of the world in such a way that it does not continue to damage human rights.