ABSTRACT
The most challenging political problems of our time express an urgent need to reimagine where, and therefore what, we take politics to be. At least, this is the daunting conclusion I take to be affirmed in many recent literatures seeking to decipher the political implications of contemporary events, structural transformations and historical trajectories. We are especially asked to be more sensitive to the limits of our inherited
political traditions in relation to sharply contested claims about globalizations, localizations, technological innovations, differentiating identities, increasing inequalities, accelerating urbanizations, undue reverence for the undemocratic authority of capitalist markets, and novel forms of global governance, regional integration, terrorizing intransigence and imperial righteousness. Moreover, many of these specific claims express a more generalized awareness of shared vulnerabilities on a not-so-lonely planet. They typically generate demands for some kind of fairness and sustainability rather than rampant development; as if there could be some other way of organizing political life than on terms given by modern accounts of capitalist universalization unravelling in linear history. They often bring appeals to forms of authority that are somehow “higher” than those expressed through secular institutions of state and law; as if there could be some higher authority than that expressed in the law, or laws, affirming the liberty, equality and security of modern subjects living within the modern sovereign state and system of sovereign states. Such claims especially provoke worries about forms of political life shaped
by the assumed distinction between the citizen of a specific state and citizens of other states, and between man and world: shaped, that is, by assumptions about the separation of the modern individualized citizen-subject from the world that has become its object; about the separation of such citizen-subjects within specific sovereign states from other citizen-subjects in other sovereign states; and thus about the extraordinarily dynamic – modernizing – forms of
political order that have shaped and been shaped by this modern citizen who is simultaneously subject to the authority of specific sovereign states and of the system of states that enables any specific sovereign state to exercise authority. Consequently, they also provoke worries about a renewed willingness to tolerate mass violence in defence not only of the sovereignty of particular – national, territorial – states in which modern citizen-subjects are supposed to thrive, but also in defence of the civilization of modernity1 that finds its most important political expression through claims about the sovereignty of particular states; and thus also through claims about the modern individualized subject who is enabled to live in a modern and modernizing world that is understood to be coextensive with the system of sovereign states – that is, with what we have come to call both international relations and world politics. We are, moreover, supposed to know more or less what we are talking
about when we deploy such terms, even in such dense sequences, with their grand references to states, citizens, subjects, subjectivities, sovereignties and nations – usually in the plural – and nature, modernity, modernization, the states system, the international and the world – usually in the singular. We know them most readily, however, and know how to think about the relations between their plurality and their singularity, when we are able to locate them with some precision, usually in a specific spatial frame, and with clear procedures for specifying their spatial differentiation. To suggest that precision is increasingly elusive, or that differentiations are less clear than might be expected, is to become aware that the most basic categories through which we claim to make sense of modern political life feel disconcertingly sloppy, even less persuasive than any historical record might lead us to expect. To speak about globalizations, localizations, cosmopolitanisms, imperialisms, regionalisms, urbanizations and all the rest, is to risk suspicions that the prevailing understandings of how we relate pluralities and singularities has become very uncertain, and thus to wonder about how we have come to make distinctions and connections between singularity and plurality, identity and difference, universality and specificity, citizen and citizen, citizen and human or subject and world. To insist that, given what we now claim to know about the intensification of shared experiences and vulnerabilities, the proper term really ought to be world politics, a politics that encompasses the entire world – wherever and whatever that is taken to be – is to sense that the place of an international in any politics that lays claim to the world has become very uncertain, in ways that provoke profound questions about what it now means to advance claims about community, subjectivity, modernity and political authority. We are supposed to know what we are talking about when we use all these
terms because we are supposed to have little trouble knowing, with considerable precision, both where the place of the international is supposed to be in the world and also where it is not. Both forms of precision are crucial, but are often understood to be mutually exclusive.
