Harmony and political pluralization

In the first two chapters of this book, I identified two clusters of reasons why political pluralization might be characterized as a problem. The first one consisted of typically political problems – incompossibility of rules, loss of identity and loss of polis – and I shall return to it in a moment. The other cluster, on which I shall focus first, was the loss of a point of reference for political science and political philosophy, academic disciplines that, at least in our times, seem to be predicated on the existence of a sovereign nationstate. Where the presence of sovereignty is presupposed, current academic debates on international justice between North and South, on global and environmental justice, on failed states, multiculturalism, terrorism, fundamentalism, ius in bello and ius ad bellum and deliberative and participatory democracy all risk missing a fundamental connection with political reality. Political pluralization implies that, at least in those respects and in so far as the sovereign state ever existed, and in those respects and in so far as it is disappearing, the disciplines need to designate or define a new environment for their object of research, politics. In Chapters 8 and following, I have tried to present such an alternative in which deviation from sovereignty, order and structure is not the exception but the rule: metropolis, a configuration of individuals participating in at least 10 types of cooperative venture, ventures that may in turn participate in different cités, and cités that may be united by further superstructures. Three traits of this alternative model need to be stressed. Firstly, the

model has no set form or limits to form. Even more than the Aristotelian polis (which still presumes a sedentary lifestyle), it is meant to be a model that fits all real-existing and imaginable forms and constellations of political cooperation. The more a group of individuals’ networks of participation in cooperative ventures coincide, the closer their structure of cooperation will resemble – depending on the type of cooperative ventures – a night watchman, welfare or totalitarian state, a theocracy, a tribe, a people or a cosmopolis. The utopian or dystopian model of sovereign nation-states, co-existing in an international anarchic system and made up of one public and several

private spheres is merely one of the infinite number of political constellations that fit within the model. Secondly, the picture I sketched was one of extremes, one in which the

processes defining political pluralization (apparently inevitably) imply a development away from a constellation of self-proclaimed sovereign nationstates towards one that can at best be described as a virtual anarchy in which each single individual human is a part of, and in fact defines, a different political constellation. The processes characterizing political pluralization – internationalization, globalization, dehierarchization, governance, etc. – are however contingent empirical phenomena. In the discussion of types of cooperation (Chapters 4-7), I examined various reasons that could explain cooperation or secession, but I did not claim that there is a cosmic law of nature dictating that those reasons will necessarily result in any or all of the processes of political pluralization described, let alone that cooperation and secession always happen for reasons, i.e. as a consequence of deliberation and design. Nor, finally, did I claim that all voluntary associations and all superstructures of such cooperative ventures will be equally important in determining the lives and opportunities of individuals. In fact, models like the not-so-sovereign state or the far-from-perfect theocracy probably describe reality far better than the extremes of Leviathan and anarchy. ‘Fuzzy politics’ is just one among an infinity of possible futures – as is a ‘restoration’ of the sovereign states system or the creation of a global sovereign. As Peters and Pierre (2005: 221) observed: ‘rumours of the death of the state are exaggerated’. Finally, the metropolis concept of the polity is not only more ecumenical

than the sovereign state model, it is also preferable for the type of moral reasons that attracts (or should attract) academics: it is politically more neutral. Both pluralization and concentration of power (up to the point of sovereignty) may occur for reasons, i.e. be the consequences of consideration and design, rather than be involuntary consequences of inescapable causal processes. A political science or political theory that builds itself on the foundations of abstract entities and processes like states, institutions, capital flows and cultural changes, that puts the question whether instances of association or disassociation are voluntary or involuntary processes between brackets, automatically reduces humans to objects while ignoring their potential to become subjects. It thereby misses the opportunity to identify processes of submission and liberation – or perhaps more neutrally put: to observe processes of bottom-up rather than top-down creation of the polity. From a liberal point of view (though that should be irrelevant to the academic) one might even say that a bias in favour of the sovereign state as the best representation of humanity is a denial of the dignity of the human being. The metropolis scenario was not developed to predict a particular future:

as far as predicting goes, it merely helps delineate a range of possible futures. It is there to help deselect and prescribe possible courses of action – and now

I turn to the other, political rather than scientific, cluster of problems associated with political pluralization. Political change and stability, the continued existence of old institutions, or the creation of new ones, cannot be legitimate without an appeal to good reasons. Among these are moral reasons, arguments in terms of a desirable, better or good society. The view of the good defended in this book was a liberal one, i.e. it presumed that enabling critical reflection (enlightenment) on one’s values and goals is a good thing, and that (in general) liberating humans from the bonds of physical, legal or intellectual slavery is a good thing. What I have tried to show is that political pluralization can be a good thing if it contributes, firstly, to the creation of institutions based on deliberation rather than fear, popularity, tradition or taboo; and secondly if the resulting institutions themselves contribute to human emancipation. Other conceptions of the good society will obviously result in different assessments of the good of political pluralization, and of the conditions under which it can be or is good. Students of politics having to abandon the sovereign nation-state model of

the polis in favour of something else is a minor discomfort compared to the disadvantages political pluralization was expected to have for the lives of all individuals: incompossibility of rule-systems, loss of polity and loss of identity – in sum, the loss of Steinberger’s ‘structure of intelligibility’ (Steinberger 2004: 13). When we investigated the grounds for human cooperation, grounds that ought to have justified our characterization of this threesome as disadvantages or problems, however, we discovered that ‘it all depends’. Loss of polity and identity, even incompossibility, are problems only when we make them problems, specifically: when they turn into obstacles for the realization of a good life. They become real problems only when one adheres to an (ultimately) communitarian theory of the good in which unity, stability and order are goals in themselves rather than, under circumstances, possible conditions for the well-being and well-living of individuals.1 If one ultimately cares about individuals, then loss of polity and identity or incompossibility cannot be more than accidental problems. We therefore ended up affirming rather than rejecting political pluraliza-

tion as an a priori valuable process expressing human emancipation, provided – among other things – that instances of political pluralization actually do contribute to the emancipation of humans. If we forget about the extremes for a moment, and think of political

pluralization not as a development towards a utopian anarchic goal but simply as a process of devolution and reorganization of authority (the dismantling of the sovereign nation-state) in which relatively stable superstructures can still unite cités and cooperative ventures, in which even states of sorts are possible, we seem to come a lot closer to what students of the various forms of political pluralization believe is happening in today’s world. To make sense of the multi-interpretable character of this process, many an author has felt the need to look for historical comparisons. Some, for instance, have argued that we are entering an era of ‘new Medievalism’ (Bull

2002, see also Chapter 2 of this book). Since history rarely repeats itself repeats itself, the medieval model is only a simile, highlighting interesting resemblances but also obscuring relevant dissimilarities – such as the nonexistence today (except in legal fiction) of Roma aeterna or (except in religious fiction) of a universal Church. Instead of a new medievalism, I would like to offer a different simile – with

of course a similar word of warning on dissimilarities – to indicate where political pluralization may lead us. One could argue that the present global political system, regional systems like the EU and even individual states themselves show striking resemblances to the Dutch Republic of 1572-1795,2

famed by Locke, Descartes, Bayle and countless others as an example to the world in liberty, equality, tolerance and justice.3