Compared to Held and Falk, Habermas' normative critique of globalisation rests upon a sociological conception of world community. In one sense, the ideal type of dialogic world society is a normative sociological account of cosmopolitan society.
The ideal types of global social democracy and humane global governance use the premise of the equality of human being, in its moral and legal senses, for defining an ideal type global governance rather than an ideal world community, in its sociological sense. It is important to note that while the phrase dialogic world society has not specifically been used by Habermas for the development of his normative analysis, such an account can be drawn from his works.
Habermas’ ideal type and normative critique of globalisation can be traced in his works in particular in his book entitled, The Postnational Constellation. It seems Habermas uses the premise of human's equal access to communicative rationality as the foundation of his ideal type of dialogic world society. Habermas' critical social theory implies that individuals' moral and political equalities ultimately originate from individauls’ epistemic equal access to communicative rationality.214 Max Pensky in his introduction to The Postnational Constellation introduces this issue in this way:
Habermas argues that universality is embedded in the most basic capacities that we possess as persons capable of speaking, hearing, giving and accepting reasons for our actions, and conducting our lives correspondingly. In the most fundamental and distinctive human capacity-- the ability to speak to one another, to decide on the basis of reasons and arguments, to distinguish between understanding and deception-- Habermas insists we find a universal, if modest, basis for the great political innovations of popular sovereignty, legally enforceable human rights, democratic procedures…through the mutual recognitions of the status of personhood. The central claim of Habermas's theories is that the institutions based on the communicative use of human reason, from our moral intuitions to the institutions of the democratic constitutional state under the rule of law, are reasonable…215[emphasis added].
Given Habermas' account of universality, the main premise of the ideal type of dialogic world society is an equal access of humans to communicative rationality.
Habermas links such an epistemic equality with the individual's legal and political
214 See David M. Rasmussen, Reading Habermas, (USA, Basil Blackwell: 1990), pp.57-74.
215 Jurgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, Political Essays, transl. and ed. by Max Pensky, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p.ix.
equality, where he argues that in our ability to speak with each other we find a universal basis for the rule of law and democracy. If dialogic world society rests on peoples' communicative rationality, peoples can use such a rationality to shape a set of globally shared values on human nature.
Andrew Linklater points out: “For Habermas, the role of communicative action in social existence makes the establishment of a universal communicative community possible. …The normative task of critical theory is to defend the ideal of universal communities of discourse, the sociological dimension of critical inquiry ought to investigate the forms of social learning which are capable of turning ideals into reality. …”216 The importance of the cultural sphere for creating a universal social democracy means that it can emerge through a social learning process in which the core values of human equality find a global respect. The ideal type of the dialogic world society creates a strong link between global culture and global politics.
Habermas does not specifically argues on an inter-civilisational dialogue as a cultural mechanism for the formation of a universal dialogic community, but Linklater and Marc Lynch, among others, apply Habermas' theory of social learning to address the possibility of a universal dialogic community emerging.217
3.3.2 Globalisation as the Emergence of a Post-National Constellation Like Held and Falk, Habermas describes globalisation as a global organisational transition from the modern states-system towards a post-national world order. The dynamic of globalisation is, for Habermas, reasonably clear in one respect, “it heralds the end of the global dominance of the nation-state as a model for political organization.”218 The term ‘postnational’ here means that globalisation of economic processes, of modes of communication and commerce, and of culture all increasingly reduce the role of national states in global organisation of peoples. It fundamentally challenges the relevance of the nation-state as a continued political model.219 However, the quality of Habermas' analysis of the dynamic of globalisation differs from Held and Falk. Similar to their position, Habermas views contemporary globalisation as a ‘global system integration’ that has mainly shaped through global
216 Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (1998), p.142.
217 Linklater, "Globalisation and the Transformation of Political Community,"(2003), and Marc Lynch, The Dialogue of Civilisations and International Public Sphere, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2000, 29 (2), pp.307-330.
218 Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, p. xiii.
219 Ibid.
markets forces. He writes, “This form of ‘functional integration’ of social relations via networks competes with an entirely distinct form of integration-- with a ‘social integration’ of the collective life-world of those who share a collective identity…”220 In this way, Habermas recognises a key deviation of contemporary globalisation from the ideal type of dialogic world society.
Globalisation has opened national societies to an economically driven post-national constellation. While not all of nation-states are democratic, the post-national form of social organisation that emerged after the American and French Revolutions has successfully spread over the globe. The nation state fulfils important preconditions for the societies constituted within determinate borders to exert a democratic form of self-control. In post-war Europe, the democratic process-- in the context of the nation-state system-- has been more or less institutionalised under four dimensions. However, since the end of the 1970s such forms of institutionalisation have come under increasing pressure from the forces of globalisation. Habermas introduces the four aspects of the democratization process after postwar Europe in this way: (a) the emergence of the state as an administrative state supported by taxation; (b) maintaining sovereignty over a determinate geographical territory; (c) in the specific form of the nation-state, and (d) which then democratically developed into a legal and social state.221
The first aspect of the democratic process refers to the separation of state and society through the formation of an administrative state, constituted in the form of positive law and the differentiation of a market economy, institutionalised via the principles of individual private rights. ‘Law’ in this separation process operates in order to privatise society from the state. In this sense, the modern state is a legal state, limited by the rule of law and it protects the decentralised function of a market economy. This separation means the most important regulatory powers of public administration remain reserved for the state and the state's power to levy taxes depends on resources generated by economic activity delegated to the private sphere.
The second aspect implies that nation-states system provides geographical condition for realising a self-controlled society because a state's territory will encompass the sphere of validity for a state-sanctioned legal order. A self-controlled society requires
220 Ibid., p.82.
221 Ibid., p.62.
rational-based conception of law that regulates a number of persons-- united by the decisions to grant one another precisely those rights. Hence, the nation-states system created the borders of the territorial state in which population of a state is defined as the potential subject of self-legislation who organises their society. 222
The third aspect implies that democratic self-determination of national societies can only come about if the population of a state is transformed into a nation of citizens who take their political destiny into their own hands. Habermas argues that a democratic self-organised society depends on a prior cultural integration of what is initially a number of people who have been thrown together with each other. Such a cultural integration makes the residents of a single state-controlled territory aware of a collective belonging. Only the symbolic construction of ‘a people’ makes the modern state into a nation-state.
Habermas leads us to see a strong interplay between culture and politics in the formation of the modern nation state. The fourth aspect reveals that a democratic mode of legitimation of political authority has been advocated by the nation-state system. The transition from princely to popular sovereignty transforms the rights of subject into the rights of human beings, into liberal and political civil rights. The democratic constitutional state satisfies a political order created by the people themselves and legitimated by their opinion and will-formation. He connects the democratic constitutional state with a political culture in modern democratic society that is rooted in ‘discourse rationality’. In this way, the rule of law and popular sovereignty have been legitimated through communicative use of human reason. The emergence of social welfare state was a result of the dialectic of ‘legal equality’ and
‘factual inequality’, whose principal goal was secure the societal conditions to create an opportunity for an equal distributed basic rights possible. 223
If we take the four aspects of the democratic process into account, the role of the nation-state system with regard an international ordering of peoples becomes clear.
Habermas rightly argues that after the 1970s the forces of globalisation have made the nation-state a problematic model of social order. For him, contemporary globalisation refers to a transition from the state-system to a postnational constellation in which nation-states no longer operate as the main units of the political and economic actions
222 Habermas, The Postnational Constellation pp.62-63.
223 Ibid., pp.64-65.
on a global scale. Recognising different aspects of globalisation, Habermas claims the most significant dimension of globalisation is an economic one. Various features of globalisation, in particular its economic feature, “…weaken the capacity of the nation-state to maintain its borders and to automatically regulate exchange process with its external environment.”224 Habermas argues economic globalisation has significantly increased global economic transactions, and is reaching levels achieved in no other epoch, directly affected national economics on a previously unprecedented level.
These developments include an unparallel acceleration of capital flows, a significantly increased the number of transnational corporations with global production facilities, and the increase in direct foreign investment.225 Habermas evaluates the impacts of globalisation on the political capacity of nation states due to the four aforementioned aspects of the democratic process. Hence, his normative critique of globalisation covers the dynamics of the emergence of the post-national constellation.
Globalisation has opened societies to an economically driven post-national order, but the emerging global governance has not yet realised global public sovereignty.
Habermas criticises this emerging world society due to its costs for transforming the nation-state system towards a post-national order, whereas it does not meet the conditions of a dialogic world society. In this way, he employs the four aspects of the democratic process to uncover the societal deficits of contemporary globalisation. An important impact of globalisation on the organisational capacity of a nation-state originates from increased capital mobility at the global level that makes the state's access to profits and monetary wealth more difficult, and consequently increased local competition reduces the state's capacity to collect taxes. Such negative effects of economic globalisation on the state's tax revenue undermine the state's capacity to execute its welfare state's functions. In this way, the nation-state cannot perform its predictable role in realising the rule of law through creating the societal prerequisites of individuals' equality before the law. In addition, the emerging global markets work to the disadvantage of the state's autonomy and its capacity for policy-making for their own societies, while global governance has not taken the responsibility of such a socio-economic regulation. As market-driven globalisation grows, the nation-state
224 Ibid., p.66.
225 Ibid., pp.66-67., Also see David Held, "Democracy and Globalisation", op. cit., p.251-297., and Ulrich Beck What is Globalisation? (Cambridge, Polity Press: 2000).
loses its capacities to achieve taxes and stimulate growth, and with them the ability to secure the essential foundations of its own legitimacy. 226