The new polis

Political pluralization is defined by a collaboration of economic globalization, counter-globalization by nation-states, related and unrelated forms of regional, trans-and international cooperation, delegation and derogation of powers, dehierarchization and governance. Political pluralization is expected to lead to incompossibility, loss of polity and loss of identity. These three phenomena become problems rather than merely facts when they inhibit the realization of schemes of good or just social cooperation for mutual advantage, where good or just are understood here in terms of liberal-democratic values. In the preceding chapters, we have discussed two main responses to political

pluralization: coping with it (which we rejected as insufficient) and solving it through different forms of coordination and cooperation. The premises on which the ten types of cooperation are based were analysed from one perspective on the good life only, an Enlightenment, or broadly liberal, commitment to human emancipation. Generating a categorization of the foundations of cooperative schemes that may be useful in explaining patterns of cooperation and non-cooperation, this analysis also prepared us for two conclusions: that political pluralization is a normal rather than exceptional phenomenon, and that it is not the existence of multiple, interfacing, overlapping, even counteracting cooperative schemes that is prima facie morally suspicious, but rather any form of coerced cooperation, including the sovereign nation-state, and including any attempt to control or abate its fragmentation. This is not to say that the state and other forms of forced cooperation are necessarily immoral – rather that the onus of proof now rests on the advocates of unity. From a liberal perspective, confusion about contradictory rule systems, no

matter how awkward, does not by itself offer a prima facie reason to promote cooperation and reject political pluralization. Loss of polity and loss of identity have to be re-interpreted: rather than obstacles to human emancipation, they may well express the liberation and emancipation of humans from structures – e.g. the state – that have become oppressive. Yet just as forced cooperation is not necessarily immoral, the fragmentation of the sovereign nation-state is not necessarily a good thing. Whereas involuntary

cooperation and coordination may be (or may be seen as) infringements on individual freedom and threats to autonomy and emancipation, their absence may have a similar effect: the creation of powerless individuals, subjected to rather than masters of political and economic structures. Economic globalization and its effects on the state’s freedom of economic governance is a classic example, to which the classic answers are to reinforce the state – voluntarily or not, unilaterally or not – by creating more rules to repair the state or by creating new political structures next to or above the state. Even when justified and justifiable (as we saw in Chapter 7, this is a very complicated question), the classic response may be counterproductive. The problem with this, what I would call institutional, response is similar

to what Herman van Gunsteren, speaking off the record at a conference on planning strategies, once described as the idiot with the peppermill: the idiot, noting that a little pepper made his food taste better, decides that adding ever more pepper will make his food ever tastier. In fact, the idiot in this example may well be more rational than the politicians or bureaucrats trying to ‘save’ the state – in the latter case, institutional solutions are also used where there is no a priori reason to suspect they will work (cf. also Van Gunsteren 1987: 19). The institutional answer to e.g. logrolling, suspicious contributions to election campaigns and other deficiencies of representative democracy is to create more rules, which in turn evokes new ways to evade them, which leads to new rules, etc. The more rules, the more loopholes, exceptions and dodging – and this is just one of countless similarities between institutional answers to loss of (or the quest for) political control in general, and the disastrous overestimation of the potential of planning specifically (for more on this, see Van Gunsteren 1987). Politics cannot, and should not, be reduced to the wielding of one instrument for all purposes, be it a hammer or the law; there is more to it. Chapters 10 and 11 will address this in more detail. Rather than focusing on form, they discuss substance: without for a moment wishing to deny that institutional measures can contribute to political control and even – more importantly – to individuals’ control over their lives, fates and autonomy, I want to draw attention to the representation of individuals’ interests in a world where individuals (as citizens, workers, etc.) are necessarily unevenly and unequally in control of political structures. Yet first we have to establish exactly what kind of world this would be. The liberal perspective defended so far turned out to be far from incom-

patible with – and is even theoretically supportive of – a fragmented political world. That leaves political philosophy and political science with little more than the individual as the ‘atom’ of politics; ‘molecules’ like the state or the olden time polis cannot be qualified as ‘natural’ or necessary, nor serve as natural points of reference in both disciplines. There is, however, a totally different perspective on political pluralization – one

already hinted at in previous chapters. From a (broadly) communitarian perspective on the good life, political pluralization would be unequivocally

rejected; the ‘community’ is seen as a necessary condition for the existence and evolution of the individual; and humans can only evolve into genuine individuals if their theories of the good harmonize with the community’s good. Although community and nation-state are different things, this is as close as political philosophy comes to offering a ‘political molecule’ as an alternative to liberal-Enlightenment atomism. To argue that communitarianism offers a viable and preferable alternative

to liberal emancipation because it better appreciates the problems caused by political pluralization is circular reasoning: it is the theory of the good that defines problems in the first place, i.e. qualifies facts as valued in a specific way.1 Yet communitarianism is worth looking at: our born-again politically pluralized liberal perspective, with its focus on the contingent moral justification of cooperation, gives us no reason to expect what has allegedly happened in the real world: the thousand-plus years persistence of e.g. the Roman and Chinese Empires and the Church of Rome, or the centuries that the model of the nation-state has survived. May there not be, after all, more that is eternal – and perhaps necessarily so – than the individual? Something that makes the foundations and thereby the whole of the liberal perspective flawed, politically irrelevant? It is this question that I hope to answer in the present chapter, first by questioning the real existence of, and the ontological basis for, the nation-state, then by developing a model for social cooperation that is sensitive to three ‘facts of life’: the communitarian claim that individuals cannot exist without a social setting; the liberal claim that no cooperative scheme can be justified unless it serves human emancipation, and the reality of a post-nation-state world made up of global and local communities and anything in between – a metropolis.