Cosmopolitanism and Deliberative Democracy: Norms and Justifications

The core idea shared by all cosmopolitan views is that all human beings belong to a single community and the ultimate units of moral concern are individual human beings, not state or particular forms of human associations. Nevertheless, a political theory of cosmopolitanism should confront questions regarding the possibility of a cosmopolitan project in the alleged post-metaphysical and post-universalistic theoretical framework: How can one justify cosmopolitan values without falling back on some conceptions of a fixed human nature or a shared system of belief? How are the cosmopolitan norms legitimated by those envisaged by these norms? How is the authority of the cosmopolitan norms created and maintained?

In the most influential recent political theories with an incontestable cosmopolitan potential, the metaphysical objectivity of the alleged universal values has been replaced by the intersubjective validity attainable through discursive practices and dialogue, which involves “reasoning from the point of view of other”, and reasonable agreement. This approach finds its clearest elaborations in J. Rawls’s public reason, J.Habermas’ ideal speech situation and communication action, D. Held’s layered cosmopolitanism as a mix of regulative principles and hermeneutic complexity, S. Benhabib’s cosmopolitanism as ‘democratic iterations’, in J. Bohman’s “global democratic minimum”, J. Dryzek’s ‘discursive practices’ and others. Concomitantly, the intersubjective validity attainable through discourse and deliberation attempts to offer solutions to the legitimacy questions through public justification, which is the key idea in contemporary liberal-democratic political theory, and which means that no regime is legitimate unless it is reasonable from every individual's point of view. In addition, public deliberation is considered to be an effective tool for promoting transparency, enabling those affected by decisions to see why and how they were made, contributing to greater accountability.

Therefore, from the perspective of legitimating cosmopolitan norms, deliberative practices and cosmopolitanism could be considered as being complementary. Agents of deliberation can be state representatives, NGOs (including corporations and civil society groups), and, mainly, individual citizens. Potentially, deliberative democracy includes, in a deliberation, all persons, ‘all those affected’, irrespective of the place. This focus of individual citizens constitutes the ‘hard core’ of both cosmopolitanism and deliberative democracy. Nevertheless, with its   emphasis on “reasonable agreement”, “overlapping consensus” “reasons that all can accept”, the discursive justification of norms risks either to postulate a global consensus through the attempts to justify the universality of cosmopolitanism or to re-affirm the importance of the nation-state, where the conditions for deliberation could be more easy obtained, thus falling back into ‘methodological nationalism’ (U. Beck), which assumes that humanity is divided irrevocably into a given number of nations.

Objectives

The aims of the workshop are to examine the cosmopolitan potential of deliberative democracy and to see if the cosmopolitan political theory and deliberative democracy are interrelated  approaches in conceiving post-universalist, non-metaphysical cosmopolitanism. Our main purpose is to see if deliberative democracy helps to elaborate a non-foundationalist concept of cosmopolitanism, which will not rely on the assumptions of global agreement and consensus, but which will explore the dynamics of disagreement and the cosmopolitan potential of critique.

This activity is part of the project Critical Foundations of Contemporary Cosmopolitanism supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS-UEFISCDI (code: PN-II-RU-TE-2011-3-0218, contract nr. 98/05.10.2011): http://www.nec.ro/fundatia/proiecte/p98.htm

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