Aproximación de las curvas por interpolación

In section 2, in order to assuage the multiculturalists’ concern with a shared public culture on the ground of its conservative bias in favour of cultural majorities, I proposed a reconstruction of Miller’s account of nation-building as two levels of public deliberation; those of pragmatic questions and of ethical-political questions.

Nevertheless, as a direct corollary of this reconstruction, the existing common national identity has to be under continuous scrutiny and be reformulated through public deliberation, if outdated or morally problematic aspects of them are

discovered. As such, a two-level public deliberation seems to lean heavily on the possibility that the scope of a shared public culture sufficient for preserving the national community could be determined ex ante. This is because citizens need an estimate of the said scope in order to comprehend the extent to which they could challenge the existing shared public culture at the level of the ethical-political questions without risking the erosion of the mutual trust among themselves. In this sense, the practical need to clarify the scope of the shared public culture sits

awkwardly with Miller’s claim that the republican conception of citizenship requires a public-private division to emerge through public deliberation, rather than ex ante.

This would remain a stumbling block for Miller unless he could develop a theory explaining how the process of public deliberation could help citizens reach a

consensus on a common national identity and a shared public culture that are deemed

152 sufficient to preserve their national community. In this proposed formulation, social integration in general no longer depends on the cultural similarities produced through deliberation alone; to a large extent it depends on the process of public deliberation in the hope of converging on the scope of the shared public culture necessary to supply a sufficient level of mutual trust. Note that in this formulation, citizens may not always converge on a definition of common nationality that could supply the sufficient level of mutual trust among them in practice; public

deliberation merely makes it more likely that a sufficient level of mutual trust would emerge in the long term.

In this light, I want to suggest that Habermas’s conception of a legally

institutionalised communicative action could be of service. According to Habermas, social integration could be achieved through a legally institutionalised

communicative action within nation-states. A communicative action occurs when

‘actors in the roles of speaker and hearer attempt to negotiate interpretations of the situation at hand and to harmonise their respective plans with one another through the unrestrained pursuit of illocutionary goals’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 18). A

communicative action is possible because, according to Habermas, there is a rational base to every reciprocal bond; that is, individuals confronted with various different validity claims raised by others may come to abandon or alter their original validity claims. As a result, they together engage in a more complex interpersonal

relationship and come to share an enlarged group of background norms. When applied to the reproduction of a social order, a communicative action is legally institutionalised so as to infuse the universally applicable constitutional principles with the collective will of the citizens, so that the citizens could come to see the

153 resultant policy outcomes as their own and the co-deliberators as part of their ever-increasing interpersonal relationships.

The idea of a legally institutionalised communicative action serves to help Miller escape this circular argumentation because it switches the burden of asserting the normative truth away from the political theorist as an external observer partial to a collective learning process involving all relevant moral agents as active participants.

At any rate, this is more consistent with Miller’s belief that the formulation of political principles should take account of the common people’s moral intuitions and political emotions. In other words, Miller considers it undesirable to specify what justice is independently of particular contexts and, then, require the common people to comply with them (Miller, 2013, Chap. 1). Nevertheless, Miller fails to live up to his standards for formulating normative principles, in the sense that his account of nation-building relies heavily on specifying the scope of the shared public culture necessary for preserving a national community ex ante. This amounts to

contradicting his own standard, because it bypasses the contribution of the common people’s moral intuitions and political emotions in a specific context.

Habermas’s notion of a communicative action is formulated in the face of the difficulty of asserting the normative truth within increasingly culturally fragmented societies. After the ‘linguistic turn,’ ‘thoughts and facts can no longer be located immediately in the world of perceived or imagined objects; they are accessible only as linguistically ‘represented’ (dargestellt), that is, as states of affairs expressed in sentences’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 11). In a sense, the relation between the proposition of truth and the objective world is broken by the introduction of language as the medium through which a representation of the world is achieved. Since the

154 representation of the external world has to be achieved by means of communication between the speakers and the hearers, the linguistic medium alone conditions how the said representation is comprehended and negotiated among the interlocutors.

Therefore, the transcendental proposition of truth is replaced by a search for the transcendental conditions under which the representation of the external world is possible through communication.

Accordingly, the only way to salvage a sense of truth from the linguistic turn is to rely on a collective learning process through ‘transcendent moments of

unconditionality’ among interlocutors of the same communicative action. This is to say, the relation between the truth proposition and the external world could only be established through continuous justification based on validity claims amongst interlocutors. ‘Transcendent moments of unconditionality’ represent the collective recognition of certain validity claims following successful communicative actions.

The normative understanding that all deliberators converge upon and thereby incorporate into the always already familiar lifeworld is only an approximation of the truth, in the sense that it merely satisfies our own particular standards of correctness for deliberation in particular contexts (Habermas, 1996, p. 12- 7). As Habermas explains, ‘the cautionary use of the truth predicate…can be understood as the grammatical expression of a fallibility that we often experience ourselves while arguing, and observe in others when looking back at the course of past arguments in history’ (Habermas, 2003, p 38). The point here is that the fallibility of every validity claim is unavoidable, and therefore the truth proposition justified against all

refutations in particular contexts should be treated as settled for that moment, until new validity claims arise to challenge it.

155 In this light, the formulation of a common national identity and a shared public culture at the level of the ethical-political questions could be understood as a collective effort to converge on an approximation of the truth which elaborates on the positive relation between the number of cultural similarities among a group of individuals and the level of collective will to remain as a united people. There are practical difficulties with quantifying the positive correlation from an external observer’s standpoint which attempts to assert a context-independent idea of the truth. Nevertheless, such difficulty is only a manifestation of the linguistic turn which breaks the direct correspondence between the truth and the objective world with the mediation of language use. It could be similarly tackled with the

introduction of Habermas’s notion of a legally institutionalised communicative action within nation-states. On the basis of a legally institutionalised communicative action, the reformulation of a common national identity and a shared public culture could be seen, from an active participant’s standpoint, as a collective attempt to converge on the scope of the shared public culture necessary for preserving the national community through raising, justifying and recognising validity claims.

Through the ‘transcendent moments of unconditionality,’ a context-dependent approximation of the truth is reached among citizens of the same nation-state that recognises a certain formulation of a common national identity and a shared public culture as necessary for preserving the national community. The resultant common national identity and shared public culture, nonetheless, are merely ephemeral, in the sense that they, as a result of communicative action, are only steps in the collective learning process of all citizens. In other words, due to the continuous exchange between the co-deliberators on the one hand and between the deliberators and the external world on the other, the approximation of the truth is sure to be altered in the long term. It should be noted here that Habermas’s idea of a communicative

156 approach to normative truth could be applied to the justification of all norms and conventions governing social interaction. I merely suggest that it should be applied more specifically to the task of reformulating a common national identity and a shared public culture. Therefore, the approximation of a sufficient level of mutual trust among citizens does not exhaust all that a legally institutionalised

communicative action could achieve.

Moreover, on top of producing a common national identity and a shared public culture that approximates to an idea of the truth within the particular context of a nation-state, public deliberation per se would serve to enlarge the extent of shared normative understanding among the co-deliberators and increase the complexity of their interpersonal relationships at the same time, if it were based on Habermas’s notion of a legally institutionalised communicative action. Therefore, insofar as public deliberation thus structured could realise social integration alongside an increased extent of shared normative understanding independently of the resultant common nationality, to a certain extent, it could explain why a national community would not collapse, even though citizens might not always converge on a common nationality that proves to be sufficient for preserving their national community.

Hence, should Miller’s account of the nation-building process incorporate Habermas’s idea of a legally institutionalised communicative action, it would provide an remedy for his failure to elaborate on the exact parameters of a shared public culture along the line of the arguments I outlined earlier in this section. That is to say, the problem caused by Miller’s failure to quantify the positive correlation between the number of cultural similarities and the level of collective will to remain as a united people could be resolved in two senses. Firstly, any idea of the truth,

157 including the said positive correlation, has to be communicatively approximated through a legally institutionalised communicative action within the nation-state.

Secondly, the process of public deliberation per se also serves to realise social integration to some extent. In other words, this manoeuvre, as I argued a satisfactory theory should do, switches the burden of proof decisively from the external observer alone—that is, Miller—to an infusion of an external observer’s standpoint and an active participant’s standpoint.

Nevertheless, a main difference between Miller and Habermas lies in the fact that the latter believes public deliberation per se to be sufficient for realising social

integration within nation-states, whereas Miller seems to consider it merely a means to an end—that is, the resultant common national identity and shared public culture.

This is most saliently reflected in Miller’s insistence that in some cases the scope and the types of cultural similarities make it practically impossible to establish a sovereign nation-state. For instance, a case of rival nationalities excludes quite decisively the possibility of a successful nation-building process, insofar as groups with mutually exclusive national identities would each seek to control all or part of the state’s territory (Miller, 2000, p. 128). In comparison, Habermas insists that social solidarity could be achieved through participating in a legally institutionalised communicative action on the basis of universal constitutional principles, regardless of the differences among the cultural values held by the citizens.

All in all, I do not think that by incorporating Habermas’s notion of a legally institutionalised communicative action, Miller’s account of the nation-building process would be rendered inconsistent. This is because recognising the role of public deliberation in reaching a consensus on a definition of a common national

158 identity and a shared public culture will not weaken Miller’s original position. In other words, Miller’s claim that public deliberation should aim to produce a common national identity and a shared public culture necessary for supplying a sufficient level of mutual trust is not weakened by the recognition that public deliberation should be structured on the basis of a legally institutionalised communicative action.

Moreover, in the absence of a quantifiable, positive correlation between the number of cultural similarities and the level of the collective will to remain as a united people, a communicative action is the only available approach to approximating the idea of the truth in terms of how many cultural commonalities are necessary for preserving a national community. Furthermore, the reformulation of a common national identity and a shared public culture based on a legally institutionalised communicative action could be seen as a collective learning process that strives to improve the said approximation.

Conclusion

This chapter has introduced Miller’s account of nation-building as requiring a balance between nation-building and respect for cultural pluralism, and considered four lines of the liberal multiculturalists’ criticisms of them. In section 1, I

introduced Miller’s account of the nation-building process, which depends equally on both the republican conception of citizenship and the importance of nation-building. Miller aims to affirm the importance of nation-building while employing the republican conception of citizenship to regulate the procedure through which the former is carried out so that cultural pluralism is sufficiently respected.

159 In section 2, I examined four lines of liberal multiculturalist criticisms of Miller’s account of the nation-building process. McMahan, Freeman and Laegaard question the desirability of nation-building, given the importance of respecting non-national group identities. McMahan charges that the prioritisation of national identity will suppress other aspects of personal identity. Freeman complains that a common national identity will impose an unjust burden on immigrants, requiring them to identify with the actual deeds of the cultural majority’s ancestors. Laegaard claims that a shared public culture will have to expand more than liberal multiculturalists could allow, in order to provide each citizen with a meaningful context of choices.

These three lines of multiculturalist criticisms could be mitigated, however, because as I demonstrated, they fail to understand that the nation-building process is

necessary for the functioning of major social institutions and even the protection of non-national cultural communities (be they indigenous ethic groups or immigrants).

Nevertheless, Benner advances a valid critique in that by attributing equal moral weight to nation-building efforts and the republican conception of citizenship, Miller’s account is likely to display a conservative bias in favour of the cultural majority. This poses a serious problem for Miller, in the sense that he does not have an explanation for how a shared public culture could be both the basis and the subject matter of public deliberation. In this light, I proposed to reconstruct his account of nation-building as two independent levels of public deliberation. By splitting Miller’s general idea of public deliberation into two levels—the pragmatic questions and the ethical-political questions—the existing shared public culture could serve as the basis of the public deliberation with regard to the concrete social issues, whilst it could also be the subject matter of public deliberation in relation to the reformulation of the existing common national identity and the shared public

160 culture. In this way, Miller’s account of the nation-building process could avoid the conservative bias in favour of the cultural majority. During the process of

reformulating a common national identity and a public deliberation at the ethical-political level, the public deliberation should be guided by my rendition of Miller’s notion of equal respect to the co-deliberators. As set out in section 3, the guiding principle states that all citizens should aim to advance claims in the hope that the resultant common national identity and shared public culture will be equally beneficial to all.

This reconstruction is in line with Miller’s aim to balance the need of nation-building with the respect for cultural pluralism. It has the advantage of preventing the public deliberation from favouring the cultural majorities by continuously renewing the exiting national identity alongside concrete social issues. At the global level, because of the power asymmetry among nation-states, the formulation of global regulative norms and values has been dominated by the Western cultural values. In this light, if we expect the global institutions of citizenship to be based on cosmopolitan

justifiability, all human beings or their representatives should be able to exert equal influence over the final policy outcomes of the global public deliberation. Insofar as all principles of justice should be justifiable to all human beings, as free and equal moral agents, the global public deliberation should not favour any section of the world population by default. This is the second guiding principle of the global public deliberation.

Nevertheless, this reconstruction does very little to bring all citizens to an understanding of the extent to which the existing collective identity could be challenged before it threatens the national community as a whole, because Miller

161 explains the necessary mutual trust among citizens on the sole basis of a common national identity and a shared public culture. In this case, if social integration were solely based on the resultant common national identity and shared public culture, it would make it necessary for Miller to explain, from an external observer’s

standpoint, the extent to which the citizens could challenge the current collective identity without damaging the mutual trust among citizens. In this light, I proposed in section 4 that Miller’s account of the nation-building process should incorporate Habermas’s notion of a legally institutionalised communicative action, because the latter champions the idea that social integration can be achieved through a societal-level communicative action on the basis of validity claims. Even though the societal-level of social solidarity produced by the public deliberation per se may not necessarily be enough for supplying sufficient mutual trust among citizens, this proposal could understand public deliberation as a never-ending collective learning process for approximating a sufficient level of mutual trust among citizens in the long term. In other words, this proposal partially switches the burden of proof from the external observer—that is Miller—alone to the active participants in the deliberative

democracy, since it is the co-deliberators that directly express their collective will in converging on a scope of the shared public culture that is supposedly sufficient for preserving national community. Hence, Miller could only overcome the deficiency of his account of the nation-building process by incorporating Habermas’s

conception of a communicative action. In the next chapter, I will further advance this line of argument by showing that Miller’s methodological commitment to

incorporating common moral intuitions and political emotions in the moral reasoning about political principles also implies an institutionalised deliberative procedure based on Habermas’s conception of communicative action.