Universalism has been suffering from a bad reputation, particularly as a political doctrine. The modern condition that we have come to know as nihilism makes it difficult, if not outright impossible, to invoke universal values or principles, be they transcendent or immanent, theological or scientific. Since the early twentieth century, universalism has also been under attack from various strands in philosophy and social sciences, which sought to expose the socially or politically constructed, historically contingent, culturally particular character of the allegedly universal concepts and ideals, from human rights to possessive individualism, from constitutionalism to civil society, from state sovereignty to gender equality. Such diverse approaches as social constructivism and neo-Marxism, feminism and postcolonialism, multiculturalism and poststructuralism demonstrate, in different ways, how the things we have been accustomed to consider universal are in fact products of highly particular historical conjunctures, cultural constellations, social class or economic order, and their alleged universality is always a result of a hegemonic operation of universalization that conceals the particular origin or character of what it presents as universal.
This universalization is not merely a hypocritical but also at least potentially a violent project that ventures to exclude, dominate or eliminate whatever cannot be subsumed under its hegemonic figure of universality. The elevation of a particular object or phenomenon to the status of the universal transforms the pluralistic space of coexistence of particularities into the site of the domination of the newly minted universal, paving the way for various forms of imperialism and resistance to it from other particular forces. Universalist politics is thus held to be inherently conflictual due to its hostility to difference. The mitigation of such conflicts, be they domestic or international, requires the operation that reverses the hegemonic gesture of universalization and restores the particularity of the phenomena or practices in question, making it no longer possible to invoke it as a pretext for dominating other particularities or limiting pluralism. To the extent that universality is admissible in this critical discourse, it is only as a characteristic of the space between particularities, the space of their pluralistic coexistence. In this account the universal stands precisely for the prohibition of universalization and the imperative of maintaining particularistic pluralism. From the criticism of unilateralism of US foreign policy under George W. Bush to domestic debates about multiculturalism and integration, from the discussion of the foundations of European identity to the calls for a ‘multipolar’ world we observe the problematization of universalism that has itself become almost universal.
This problematization is not only familiar but, more importantly, correct. The affirmation of sovereignty, human rights, private property or any other positive principle as a universal can only come at the price of the effacement of its historical origin and the forgetting of its past or even present use to justify exclusion or domination or advance ulterior interests of particular parties. And yet, this problematization soon stops being intellectually satisfying for at least two reasons. First, insofar as every concept or ideal can be shown to have a historical origin in a particular situation, universalism proves to be a much too easy target. Nothing is simpler than exposing the particularity of every claim to universality as a hegemonic strategy whose very fervour betrays its illegitimacy. Second, the simplicity of problematizing universalism contrasts unfavourably with the extreme difficulty of dispensing with it entirely. The only alternative to hegemonic universalization seems to be an equally unpalatable prospect of the valorization of particularism that permanently risks collapsing into relativism or nihilism. In the absence of any universal principles it becomes impossible to adjudicate between particular forms of politics, including the violent politics of exclusion, domination or extermination that hegemonic universalism was itself accused of. Domestically, the abrogation of universalism reduces political life to ceaseless conflict between particular forces with particular interests that threatens social atomization, anomie and ultimately a relapse into Hobbes’ war of all against all. Internationally, the renunciation of universalism seems to throw us back to the ‘anarchic’ international system that is conventionally dated back to the Peace of Westphalia, the system, whose propensity to war inspired countless masterpieces of political theory and the birth of the very discipline of international relations. If the reason for dispensing with universalism was its propensity to exclusion, domination and violence, then the rampant valorization of particularism does not seem to fare much better.
The tensions between universalism and particularism are evidently intensified in the condition of globalization. On the one hand, globalization is usually approached in quasi-universalist terms as the progressive integration of the world’s economic, cultural or even political (sub)systems that erase the boundaries between particular communities, paving the way for something like a ‘world politics’ to replace ‘international relations’ as we know them – a politics of a world truly becoming one and in common. Yet, we also know that at the same time as it removes obstacles to the free movement of goods and capital, fashion trends and high-tech gadgets, it also introduces or fortifies obstacles to the free movement of human beings, millions of whom experience globalization as the intensification of exclusion, inequality and oppression, whereby there is no longer any world that could be meaningfully shared in common. The universalism of globalization is thus exposed as the hegemonic project of universalization, the becoming-global of Western capitalism at the cost of the hierarchical domination of the Second, Third and Fourth Worlds that it subsumes under its logic. The promise of a universalist world politics appears to amount to little more than the global triumph of a particular world.
Thus, we end up in an aporetic situation. We can no longer accept the positive claims of universalism yet we cannot give up on it, opting for the valorization of particularistic pluralism. We are all too accustomed to exposing every discourse of world politics as an expression of a hegemonic drive for world domination, yet we also recognize the irreducibility of the world as the horizon of our being-in-common to the international domain as the site of pluralistic coexistence of particular political entities. If universalism certainly proves problematic, particularism does not appear to be a solution to its problems: indeed, is not the problem with universalism precisely that the allegedly universal was in fact particular?
This book was born out of a series of engagements with this aporia both in theoretical investigations (Prozorov, 2006a, 2009b) and empirical analyses (Prozorov, 2006b, 2009a). It attempts to transform the aporia , i.e. the dead-end into which the critique of universalism has led itself by the exposure of its particularism, into a euporia , literally a ‘happy path’, which resolves the problems of universalism within the frame of universalism itself. Such a transformation begins by granting that the critics of universalism are right about almost everything. It is certainly true that the positive content of every universalist affirmation necessarily arises out of a particular context, expresses particular interests, excludes or dominates other particular beings or phenomena. Yet, what is criticized here is not universalism but particularism that pretends to accede to universality in the manner that is always illegitimate, fake and ultimately futile. Rather than oppose such pseudo-universalist particularism with the particularism that proudly manifests its own particularity, which would do little to mitigate its violence, exclusion or domination, we ought to pose the question of the possibility of a genuine universalism that does not relapse into a hegemonic universalization of some particular content.
Yet, given that modern nihilism has rendered void every conceivable figure of the universal by restoring to it its particular origin or character, how is a nonparticularistic and non-hegemonic universalism possible? It is evidently only possible as an affirmation that is not founded on any positive principle, but takes this void itself as its sole point of departure – a void universalism . Where every positive figure of the universal is null and void, the only consistent form of universalism would be the one whose ground is the void itself. Such a universalism would by definition be immune to the ‘particularizing’ critique that dismantles universals by pointing to the particular origin or character of their content, simply because it does not have any such content or, more precisely, because whatever content it has is derived from the void alone. This universalism would make it possible to resume the discourse about world politics as something that goes beyond the global expansion of a particular vision or image of the world, since it would approach the world itself as the void, in which an infinite plurality of particular worlds emerge with no possibility of their totalization. In short, the ambition of this book is to conceptualize the move from the void of universals , which is the situation we find ourselves in today, the proliferation of hegemonic claims to universality and particularistic resistance to them, to void universalism as simultaneously a non-contradictory and a non-trivial form of politics, whose principles are defined from the void alone and apply in any positive world whatsoever. It is this politics that we shall term ‘world politics’, no longer using this term to designate the transcendence of the international system of states by a hypothetical world state but rather to refer to the intensity of universalist affirmation that puts in question the entire order of a particular world in which it intervenes. Thus, the task of this book is to reorient our discussion of universalism and world politics away from the unproductive debates on the possibility of the political unification of the world and the contestation of pseudo-universalist attempts at such unification towards the analysis of world politics as the process of the transformation of an infinite number of particular worlds on the basis of universal principles whose ground is the void alone.
The Void Universalism project is divided into two volumes. The first volume, Ontology and World Politics , deals with the question of world politics from an ontological perspective, reinterpreting the concept of politics on the basis of the idea of the World as void and developing a typology of forms of politics on the basis of what ontological axiom is affirmed in them. The second volume, Theory of the Political Subject , relocates the question of world politics to the phenomenological, intra-worldly level, posing the question of the conditions of emergence and existence of the political subject and its confrontation with intra-worldly limitations to its activity.
The ontological redefinition of world politics and the phenomenological elaboration of its subjective process evidently do not attempt to exhaust the field of inquiry about world politics, but merely lay the preparatory groundwork for further investigations by addressing the following basic questions. What is the world as a referent object of a politics that would go beyond the familiar dualism of particularistic pluralism of international politics and its utopian transcendence in a unified world state or community? What is politics , if it is defined on the basis of the concept of the world alone and logically transcends any particular intra-worldly principle? How can the subject of this politics, which transcends every particular world, nonetheless emerge within such worlds and persist in transforming them? The two volumes will fulfill their function if they serve as a background for further theoretical elaboration and empirical analysis of world-political affirmation in a variety of worlds we dwell in.
The research for this book was initiated during my fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2007–10) and completed during my current employment as Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Department of Political and Economic Studies at the University of Helsinki. I am thankful to the administrative staff of both institutions for their hospitality and efficiency that made the work on this book so much easier.
Early versions of some of the chapters in this book have been presented as conference papers, guest lectures and talks. I am thankful to my colleagues, whose comments and criticism were of great help in improving the final version: Jens Bartelson, Andreas Behnke, Jenny Edkins, Pertti Joenniemi, Susanna Lindberg, Artem Magun, Vyacheslav Morozov, Sofia Näsström, Louiza Odysseos, Robert Oprisko, Heikki Patomaki, Simona Rentea, Helena Rytovuori-Apunen, Yevgeni Roshchin, R.B.J. Walker, Alexander Wendt, Andreja Zevnik. I am particularly grateful to Mika Ojakangas, who read the entire manuscript in serial instalments and offered helpful and encouraging comments throughout the writing process.
Every scholar has at least once been asked by a non-academic friend, relative or neighbour to describe his or her project ‘in a few words’, preferably those of ordinary language – a request as understandable as it is difficult to adequately fulfill. Having gone through this ordeal with my previous books, with these volumes I am finally ready to indulge this request and proudly present their argument not simply in a few words but with the help of just two symbols of logic: the existential quantifier ∃, designating ‘there is’, and the universal quantifier ∀, designating ‘for all’. The argument of the Void Universalism dilogy is that besides and beyond the infinite plurality of particular worlds that we inhabit there is the immediate and non-totalizable universality of the World as void. World politics is nothing more yet nothing less than the affirmation of this universality in the form of the axioms of freedom, equality and community, which seeks to transform an infinity of particular worlds on their basis, overturning the exclusions, hierarchies and restrictions constitutive of intra-worldly orders. The content of world politics is thus entirely contained in the affirmation that universality exists , that ‘there is’ a ‘for all’. To put it briefly, ∃ ∀. There you go.
Sergei Prozorov
Helsinki
January 2013