In my title the conjunction of the terms “secularism and cosmopolitanism” seems to announce a complementarity to be discovered or constructed through an effort at definition and proposition. I make no secret of the fact that these two notions are, for me, associated with basically positive values: they make up part of what characterizes democratic politics. Yet, as contemporary debates unfold in what has become a transnational framework, it is no longer possible not to see that their combination conceals profound contradictions. I am now persuaded that, in the current situation (the final result of a long history), each term calls the validity of the other into question or, at any rate, undermines its stability and deconstructs its apparently solidly established meaning.1 As a result, it has become much harder to consider them complementary aspects of a single civic or democratic project. That is why I do not here intend simply to wed cosmopolitanism and secularism in a single problematic—which it would be quite natural to associate with the Enlightenment tradition or the project of modernity, even if it remains “unfinished” (Habermas), an association that would lead some of our contemporaries to proclaim their abiding value, and others, on the contrary, to denounce, with varying intentions, the indelible trace of a hegemonic discourse in them, supposed to be the discourse of a Eurocentric ideology’s conquest of the world. Instead, I propose to discuss the presuppositions underlying them, and, thus, to complicate our representation of them.
Whence the questions, anything but natural, that I propose to explore here. The following question, for example: supposing that, under the conditions of contemporary politics, no cosmopolitical project is tenable without secularization (in other words, supposing that the idea of a “religious cosmopolitanism” is untenable per se), why is it that holding up a secular or secularized perspective for the construction of the cosmopolis only adds (at least initially) new problems and contradictions to those already entailed by the idea of moving from citizenship at a national level to transnational citizenship? In other words, why does the idea of a public sphere that is “secularized” or freed from the grip of religion (an idea that seemed straightforward enough even if it did not command unanimous consent) at the level of the polis or nation, become confusing, impracticable, or even self-destructive when we shift our concept of politics to the level of the world or humanity, that is, to a space a priori free of limits and exclusions? How must we proceed so that the obstacles before such a representation of things do not simply accentuate its hopelessly utopian or potentially destructive character, but, rather, foster discussion of intellectual tasks and rules of governance that put our societies in a cosmopolitical perspective?
Inversely, however, let us suppose that—in some parts of the world or even, perhaps, all of them, albeit differently in each case—it is no longer really possible to implement a secular or secularized conception of politics, to institutionalize secular modalities for regulating social conflict, improving public services (education, health care, urban development, and so on), and broadening access to means of communication without building a “cosmopolitical” dimension into the very definition of the political. In that case, no truly secularized democratic politics that is socially and culturally progressive is tenable short of cosmopolitanism. This comes down to admitting that a secularism (or laïcité) that defines itself along communitarian lines, guided essentially by imperatives of national unity, national identity, or national security, will soon find itself entangled in contradiction and, eventually, become self-destructive. Why, then, do all these manifest realities not pave the way for institutional solutions, but, rather, seem to multiply ideological obstacles and obscure the very possibility of such solutions?
Let there be no mistake—not only do I not think that we can detach secularism and cosmopolitanism from each other as political concepts, but the heated debates they provoke have convinced me more than ever of the need to study each as a function of, and in terms of, the other.2 By now, however, it is (or ought to be) very clear that a conjunction of this sort introduces a terrible uncertainty into each of the determinations that we are in the habit of placing under these two rubrics. Indeed, the debate is so vehement that we may well wonder whether they will still be recognizable after undergoing the trials they face today.
At this point, I am tempted to borrow the title of a recent book by the American historian Joan Wallach Scott on women’s citizenship in the French Constitution (before returning to some of Scott’s analyses of French laïcité): Only Paradoxes to Offer.3 I believe that, here too, we touch on what I have elsewhere tried to analyze as the antinomic character of the development of citizenship as a historic institution: citizenship is intrinsically related to the processes of democratizing politics, yet is irreducible to “pure” democracy, for which liberty is the condition of equality, and vice versa. Citizenship can only represent the unstable, irreducibly conflictual balance between its own emancipatory and conservative—one might even say insurgent and constitutional—tendencies. That is also why the very existence of citizenship hinges, every time it finds itself caught up in a major historical transformation, on its capacity to be filled with new contents. Inevitably, the institution of citizenship as a whole is called into question, and presents itself to us in paradoxical form, because we find it hard to imagine (and thus to invent) the new in old language. That is, of course, a radically foreshortened way of stating the matter, but one that may make it easier to understand my motive for describing cosmopolitanism and secularism as two aspects of a project to democratize democracy that we can neither arbitrarily separate nor combine without, in both cases, also calling them into question. In other words, we here come up against internal limits on the democratic project that we can by no means be sure of overcoming in the foreseeable future. That makes it all the more important to discuss their nature.4