Dignity in Adversity E-Book

Seyla Benhabib

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 565

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The language of human rights has become the public vocabulary of our contemporary world. Ironically, as the political influence of human rights has grown, their philosophical justification has become ever more controversial.

Building on a theory of discourse ethics and communicative rationality, this book addresses the politics and philosophy of human rights against the background of the broader social transformations that are shaping the modern world. Rejecting the reduction of international human rights to the Trojan horse of a neo-liberal empire's bid for world power, as well as the conservative objections to legal cosmopolitanism as encroachments upon democratic sovereignty, Benhabib develops two key concepts to move beyond these false antitheses. International human rights norms need contextualization in specific polities through processes of what she calls 'democratic iterations.' Furthermore, such norms have a 'jurisgenerative power,' in that they enable new actors to enter fields of social and political contestation; they promote new vocabularies for public claim-making and anticipate a justice to come.

Ranging over themes such as sovereignty, citizenship, genocide, European anti-semitism, the crisis of the nation-state, and the 'scarf affair' in contemporary Europe and Turkey, this major new book by one of our leading political theorists reflects upon the political transformations of our times and makes a compelling case for a cosmopolitanism without illusions.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1 INTRODUCTION

2 FROM THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

3 INTERNATIONAL LAW AND HUMAN PLURALITY IN THE SHADOW OF TOTALITARIANISM

4 ANOTHER UNIVERSALISM

5 IS THERE A HUMAN RIGHT TO DEMOCRACY?

6 TWILIGHT OF SOVEREIGNTY OR THE EMERGENCE OF COSMOPOLITAN NORMS?

7 CLAIMING RIGHTS ACROSS BORDERS

8 DEMOCRATIC EXCLUSIONS AND DEMOCRATIC ITERATIONS

9 THE RETURN OF POLITICAL THEOLOGY

10 UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA IN OUR TIMES

Natural Rights and Social Utopias

Bloch and the Philosophy of the Subject

Utopia and New Social Movements

The Reframing of State and Society under Globalization

A Blochian Legacy

The Threat of Dsytopias

Index

To the Memories of John E. Smith and David E. Apter

Copyright © Seyla Benhabib 2011

The right of Seyla Benhabib to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2011 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5442-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5443-0(pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5972-5(Single-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5971-8(Multi-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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PREFACE

Around September 18, 2001, almost a decade ago, I crossed Whitney Avenue in New Haven, Connecticut, with my 14-year-old daughter, traveling from our house to a Red Cross center to give blood for the victims and rescuers of the Twin World Towers 90 miles away. As I gave my name, Seyla Benhabib, to the nurse in attendance, she froze for a moment: “Ben-Habib” – wasn’t Habib an Arabic name? “Who was this lady with a foreign accent,” she seemed to be thinking, “coming in to give blood?”

My daughter, who noted the nurse’s hesitation, immediately understood that I was being assessed as an Arab or a Muslim, and she squeezed my hand in solidarity. I could not help feeling, that early evening in Connecticut, that my gesture of solidarity with the victims of 9/11 and the fire-fighters and policemen of New York City was not wanted and, as it turned out, not needed: students of Yale University and other schools had already rushed to the Red Cross banks across New Haven, and actually, the blood banks were well stocked.

Nevertheless, something in me ached. The moral of this story is not about discrimination against Middle Easterners, Muslims, or Arab Americans, real though it is. Rather, it is about the complexity and multiplicity of identities to which my name testifies, but which bureaucratic administration shorthands in an increasingly securitized world political environment reduced to unequivocal signals of danger during the so-called “war on terror.” The lady at the Red Cross station could not have known that I was a Sephardic Jew born in Istanbul, whose earliest known ancestor was called “Jacob Ibn-Habib,” from the city of Zamora in Spain, and whose descendants were Rabbis and prominent members of a Jewish community first in Spain and then in Salonica and Galipoli. According to some historical records, when my ancestors tried but failed to persuade Christian authorities to permit the Jews to stay in Spain, they, like thousands in that period, left to seek refuge in the Ottoman Empire.1

Islam for them was not a religion of war and jihad but a religion of tolerance that respected the Jews and granted them the “right of hospitality,” in Kant’s sense, and not only because they were “people of the book,” namely, the Torah, which Islam, along with the New Testament, acknowledged as being holy. Certainly, the history of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire has its experiences of discrimination, prejudice, oppression, and exclusion. Yet when I read about l’affair du foulard – the scarf affair – that erupted in France when French authorities banned Muslim girls from attending public schools with their heads covered, and about the “turban or basörtü meselesi” in Turkey, I think of my own grandmothers and aunts. They covered and uncovered their hair in much the same way as their Muslim neighbors did. I also think of Orthodox Jewish women who wear wigs in public places in Brooklyn, Queens, Jerusalem, as well as Paris and London. And I ask, “a Turkish-Jew?” “A Jewish Turk?” “A Sephardic Jew growing up in a Muslim-majority country”? “A child of Ataturk’s Republic?” What does it all mean?

The eruption of political Islam into world politics after September 11, 2001, has thrust these aspects of my biography, which I had considered of private import only, into theoretical and political debates concerning the “dialectic of Enlightenment” and the Jewish experience, international law and the Holocaust, Islam in contemporary Europe, and the meaning of contemporary cosmopolitanism.

The essays collected in this volume, which were written in the period from 2006 to 2010, document this trajectory. They continue the projects of discourse ethics and communicative rationality and freedom, which I have outlined in various works since the early 1990s, by extending them into the terrain of legal cosmopolitanism and recent world political events.

At the center of much contemporary political discourse is the concept of “human rights”: their justification; their scope; the relationship of philosophical accounts of rights to international declarations and to international human rights law, and their diversity across constitutions and legal traditions.

The following chapters discuss the philosophy and politics of human rights by offering a systematic account of their place within the project of discourse ethics and communicative rationality. They also examine rights against the background of changing conceptions of citizenship in Europe, in particular, as a consequence of Muslim migration, and they look at contentious debates since September 11, 2001, some of which dismiss demands for human rights as hypocritical justifications for “humanitarian” interventions, at best, and neo-imperialist ventures of global capitalism, at worst. But considerations of rights cannot be entertained independently of transformations of state sovereignty. Today, the tensions between the changing status of state sovereignty in international law and the normative ideal of a democratically self-governing people are the source of much acrimony. For some, international law undermines democratic sovereignty; for others – and I count myself among them – it enhances it. My aim in this book is to explore this complex landscape and to situate human rights discourse within a vision of democratic iterative politics.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 See Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th–20th Centuries (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A sabbatical from Yale University from January to July 2009, also generously supplemented by the Wissenschafstkolleg zu Berlin, first enabled me to conceptualize this collection. A subsequent stay from mid-June to mid-July 2010, in the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad-Homburg, permitted me to develop it further. My thanks go to Dieter Grimm, Andrea Büchler, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, who shared their time at the Wissenschaftskolleg with me, and to Rainer Forst and Stefan Gosepath, from the University of Frankfurt, who enabled and funded my stay in Bad-Homburg through the “Exzellenzcluster Initiative.” Many thanks also to Peter Niesen and David Owen for their sharp observations during my stay in Bad-Homburg.

Conversations with Benjamin Barber, Ken Baynes, Richard Bernstein, Hauke Brunkhorst, Maeve Cooke, Nancy Fraser, Alessandro Ferrara, Jürgen Habermas, Regina Kreide, Thomas McCarthy, David Rasmussen, Bill Scheuerman, and Christian Volk have enriched my life as well as my thinking. Among my Yale colleagues, I am grateful to criticisms and observations by Bruce Ackerman, Alec Stone Sweet, Anthony Kronman, Karuna Mantena, and Andrew March. David Garcia Alvarez, a Spanish Fulbright Scholar at Yale, has been a most stimulating conversation partner on issues of cosmopolitanism in the last several years and has generously provided me with multiple references to literature I would have otherwise missed.

My collaboration with the RESET Foundation on Dialogue of Civilizations, and the seminars we have conducted since 2007 in Istanbul, called “Philosophers Cross the Bosphorus. Encounters Across all Divides,” have enabled me to return to Turkey on a regular basis and therefore to relive and rethink the meaning of human rights in these turbulent times. I am grateful to Giancarlo Bosetti and Nina von Fürstenberg for making the Istanbul seminars possible.

A special word of thanks is due to Judith Resnik, my tireless friend and colleague from the Yale Law School, whose interests in gender, federalism, migration, and human rights have inspired my thinking in the last decade. To Robert Post, current Dean of the Yale Law School, I am grateful for co-teaching a course on “Human Rights and Sovereignty,” during which many of the themes discussed in this book first gained sharper focus. In the summer of 2010, Leora Bilsky of the Tel-Aviv Law School and I co-taught a mini version of the Human Rights and Sovereignty seminar at the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies, by situating these topics within the context of the Holocaust and twentieth-century Jewish history. The interaction between normative theory and legal thinking, which these three scholars exemplify in their work, has inspired many of the essays in this collection.

My students Anna Jurkevics, Peter Verovsek, and Axel Wodrich have provided much bibliographic help and commentary. Anna Jurkevics, in particular, has been a tireless and meticulous assistant in helping with various drafts of these essays.

Turkuler Isiksel, who completed her excellent dissertation on “Europe’s Functional Constitution: A Theory of Constitutionalism Beyond the State” in the fall of 2010, has inspired me for many years with her observations and writing on the European Union.

To my husband, Jim Sleeper, I owe not only suggestions for the title of this book, but gratitude for editorial and logistical assistance across continents. I am heartened as well as proud that my daughter Laura Schaefer has made fighting for human rights her life’s goal.

This book is dedicated to the memory of two teachers whom I lost in 2009–10. John E. Smith, the Clarke Professor of Moral Philosophy at Yale University, was my dissertation advisor and moral guide after 1972. From him, I learned to enter into and extend the conversation between German Philosophy and American Pragmatism.

David E. Apter, the Heinz Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Yale, was my cosmopolitan mentor, whose commitment to social change and high theory in the social sciences set a shining example for me throughout the years. I miss John and David as I write these words.

Seyla Benhabib

Alford, Massachusetts, and NY City

December 2010

1

INTRODUCTION

Cosmopolitanism without Illusions

Cosmopolitans and Dead Souls

In the spring of 2004, the far-seeing even if irritating political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published “Dead Souls. The Denationalization of the American Elite.”1 Huntington, who only a decade earlier had created the famous phrase, “the clash of civilizations,” resorted in this 2004 essay to attaching another memorable image to an argument. He quotes from Walter Scott’s “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”: “Breathes there the man with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said:/ ‘This is my own, my native Land?’/Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned/As home his footsteps he hath turned … /From wandering on a foreign strand?”2

Yes, answers Huntington; the number of “dead souls” is growing “among America’s business, professional, intellectual and academic elites.” Some of these elites are universalists, who take American nationalism and exceptionalism to the extreme and who want to spread democracy across the world because America is the “universal nation” (6). Others are economic elites who see globalization as a transcendent force that is breaking down national boundaries and giving rise to a new civitas maxima in the shape of the global market. Still a third group of dead souls, in Huntington’s view, are moralists who deride patriotism and nationalism and argue that “international law, institutions, regimes and norms are morally superior to those of individual nations” (6). In contrast, for most ordinary citizens of most states, he argues, nationalism is a potent force that still lights fire in their hearts and makes them feel happy to return home, from “wandering on a foreign strand.”

Are cosmopolitans dead souls, then? Is cosmopolitanism the privileged attitude of globe-trotting and world-hugging elites, removed from the concerns of ordinary citizens?

The essays collected in this volume contend that “cosmopolitanism” denotes no such privileged attitude but rather, a field of unresolved contrasts: between particularistic attachments and universalist aspirations; between the multiplicity of human laws and the ideal of a rational order that would be common to all human cities; and between belief in the unity of humankind and the healthy agonisms and antagonisms generated by human diversity.

Cosmopolitans become dead souls only if they forget these tensions and contrasts and embrace instead a Polyannaish, ceaseless affirmation of global oneness and unity. As David J. Depew wisely observes, “Cosmopolitanism, then, considered as a positive ideal, whether formally or materially, generates antinomies that undermine its internal coherence … Considered, however, as a critical ideal, these difficulties largely disappear. The resulting conception of cosmopolitanism [is] a negative ideal aimed at blocking false totalization.”3

Pursuing this conception of cosmopolitanism as a critical and, in some ways, “a negative ideal aimed at blocking false totalization,” the following essays explore the tensions at the heart of this project. I focus on the unity and diversity of human rights; on the conflicts between democracy and cosmopolitanism; on the vision of a world with porous borders and the closure required by democratic sovereignty. That I choose the term cosmopolitanism to carry out such a project may surprise some. Until recently, the term lay buried in the study of ideas of the eighteenth century; by the nineteenth-century, historians were already struggling with the rise of nationalism. Cosmopolitanism seemed a forgotten expression of a discredited European and North American Enlightenment.4

The last two decades have seen a remarkable revival of interest in cosmopolitanism across a wide variety of fields, ranging from law to cultural studies, from philosophy to international politics, and even to city planning and urban studies.5 Undoubtedly, the most important reason for this shift in our sensibilities and cognitions is the confluence of epoch-making transformations, referred to as “globalization” and the end of the “Westphalian-Keynesian-Fordist” paradigm by many;6 as the spread of neo-liberal capitalism by some; and as the rise of multiculturalism and the displacement of the West by still others. Cosmopolitanism has become a place-holder for thinking beyond the confusing present towards a possible and viable future. Pheng Cheah characterizes this present in the following words:

What is distinctively new about the revival of cosmopolitanism that began in the 1990’s is the attempt to ground the normative critique of nationalism in analyses of contemporary globalization and its effects. Hence, studies of various global phenomena such as transcultural encounters, mass migration and population transfers between East and West, First and Third Worlds, North and South, the rise of global financial and business networks, the formation of transnational advocacy networks, and the proliferation of transnational human rights instruments have been used to corroborate the general argument that globalizing processes, both past and present, objectively embody different forms of normative, non-ethnocentric cosmopolitanism because they rearticulate, radically transform, and even explode the boundaries of regional and national consciousness and local ethnic identities.