University of Groningen
National Sovereigntism and Global Constitutionalism
Rensmann, Lars
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Critical Horizons. A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory
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10.1080/14409917.2016.1117811
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Rensmann, L. (2016). National Sovereigntism and Global Constitutionalism: An Adornian Cosmopolitan
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Critical Horizons. A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory
,
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(1), 24-39.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2016.1117811
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National Sovereigntism and Global
Constitutionalism: An Adornian
Cosmopolitan Critique
Lars Rensmann
Department of Political Science and International Affairs, John Cabot
University, Italy
There are two dominant schools of thought addressing problems of cosmopo-
litanism and (international) conflict: democratic national sovereigntism,
inspired by Hegel, and global constitutionalism, inspired by Kant and reformu-
lated by Habermas. This paper develops a third position by reading Adorno’s
critique of both theoretical traditions. Rather than compromising between
these camps, Adorno triangulates between them. Critically illuminating their
respective deficiencies in view of the changing conditions of a globalized
modern world has critical implications for cosmopolitics. Although largely
negative, Adorno’s critique provides an important framework for a contesta-
tory reformulation of cosmopolitanism, one that is better equipped to con-
front societal and political global conflicts insufficiently reflected in
sovereigntist and global constitutionalist models.
keywords Adorno, conflict, cosmopolitanism, global constitutionalism,
Habermas, Hegel, Kant, sovereignty
Despite the growing body of literature on cosmopolitan theory, much of contempor-
ary normative political theorizing on global politics remains caught in the traditional
dichotomy between national democratic sovereigntism and liberal cosmopolitan
constitutionalism.
1
The former assumes that the realization of democratic self-
determination requires “thick” ties to particular circumscribed collectives and
their norms. Such a politics of limits anchored in collective mores and protected
publics is linked to rigorous, “Westphalian” or “realist” defences of states’ claims
to sovereign autonomy against both foreign interfere nce and depoliticized
1
S. Benhabib, “Claiming Rights Across Borders: International Human Rights and Democratic Sovereignty,” American
Political Science Review 103.4 (2009): 691–704.
critical horizon s , Vol. 17 No. 1, February, 2016, 24–39
© Critical Horizons Pty Ltd 2016 DOI 10.1080/14409917.2016.1117811
technocratic transnational governance. This camp embraces defenders of liberal
nationalism, agonistic democratic theorists and some deliberative democrats.
2
Liberal global constitutionalism, on the other hand, offers an all-encompassing
view of global order shaped by formalized universal ethical, political and legal prin-
ciples and forms of global citizenship. It suggests that robust, binding forms of
global authority, global public law and international institutional integration are
required, at least in key areas of global public policy affecting humankind as a
whole, such as human rights and the environment.
3
Arguably, however, both
camps have failed to adequately respond to the constitutive conflicts of world
society by reflecting on the shortcomings and limits of the principle s they seek to
defend or establish. These range from issues of systemic global socioeconomic antag-
onisms and institutionalized democratic exclusion to violent inter- and intra-state
conflicts and crimes against humanity.
This paper engages with and problematizes both traditions, and particularly their
capacity to address (international) conflict, by critically reading G. W. F. Hegel and
Immanuel Kant through the lens of Theodor Adorno. National sovereigntism is epit-
omized by Hegel and his followers, while liberal legal cosmopolitanism is inspired by
Kant and reformulated in Jürgen Habermas’s global constitutionalism. Adorno, a
largely overlooked theoretical resource for cosmopolitan theorizing, triangulates,
rather than compromises, between Hegel and Kant (and both camps respectively)
by illuminating the most serious deficiencies of each. Instead of striking a compromise
between the two camps, the paper argues that he thus engenders an alternative cosmo-
politan view which seeks to address conflicts of structural domination, political exclu-
sion and collective persecution constitutive of modern world society.
The paper proceeds in three steps. First, Hegelian notions grounding national
sovereigntism and collective particularism are subjected to Adorno’s critique in
order to expose their normative and empirical contradictions. Second, in light of
this, Adorno’s treatment of the virtues and problems of Kant’s cosmopolitanism
and, by extrapolation, Habermas’s (post-)Kantian global legal constitutionalism is
2
See D. Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); C. Offe, “Governance: An ‘Empty Signifier’?,”
Constellations 16.4 (2009): 500–62; Y. Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993);
C. Mouffe, On the Political: Thinking in Action (New York: Routledge, 2005); and C. Mouffe, “Which World
Order: Cosmopolitan or Multipolar?,” Ethical Perspectives 15.4 (2008): 453–67. For a critique, see M. Thaler, “The
Illusion of Purity: Chantal Mouffe’s Realist Critique of Cosmopolitanism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36.7
(2010): 785–800.
3
D. Archibugi, A Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Towards Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008); J. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); J. Habermas,
The Divided West (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2006); D. Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the
Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); and R. Marchetti,
“Models of Global Democracy: In Defense of Cosmo-Federalism,” in Global Democracy: Normative and Empirical Per-
spectives, ed. D. Archibugi et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 22–46. Some recent variations of
“moderate,”“rooted” or “statist” cosmopolitanism attempt to strike a balance between the two traditions. See
P. Lenard and M. Moore, “A Defense of Moderate Cosmopolitanism and/or Moderate Liberal Nationalism,” in
Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Canada and the World, ed. W. Kymlicka and K. Walker (Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press, 2012), 47–68; G. Hirshberg, “A Defense of Moderate Cosmopolitanism” (Dissertation, Faculty of
the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Georgetown University, 2009); S. Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); K.-C. Tan, “Cosmopolitanism and Patriotism,” in Rooted Cosmopolitan-
ism, ed. Kymlicka and Walker, 31–46; L. Ypi, “Statist Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 16.1 (2008):
48–71; D. Weinstock, “Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Unpacking the Arguments,” in Rooted Cosmopolitanism, ed. Kym-
licka and Walker, 87–104.
NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTISM AND GLOBAL CONSTITUTIONALISM 25
reconstructed. Absorbing both the insights and the limitations of each school of
thought, these moves enable a change in perspective that takes cosmopolitan think-
ing further: beyond particularistic rejections, but also beyond formalistic global
public law that is decoupled from substantive social justice, democratic politics,
and particulars. Finally, the paper considers Adorno’s own non-formalistic cosmo-
politan respo nses to key domains of conflict in contemporary world society,
which are structural, institutional, and openly violent. Notwithstanding the under-
theorized nature of his claims and the lack of a comprehensive “positive” model,
it is argued that Adorno’s contributions help to engender a self-reflexive reformula-
tion of cosmopolitan constitutionalism from below in an increasingly interdepen-
dent, “partially globalized world.”
4
Hegel and the fetishization of national sovereigntism
In more ways than one the antinomy between liberal cosmopolitanism and demo-
cratic sovereigntism continues to mirror the conflict between Hegel’s and Kant’s
respective thinking on the cosmopolitan question, their respective problematic pre-
suppositions on legal and political authority, and their other shortcomings when it
comes to dealing with conflict – the manifold theoretical revisions in both camps
notwithstanding. No one has elaborated their mutual critique and the implications
of such a critique for a cosmopolitan project more pointedly than Adorno. The start-
ing point for the development of a critical Adornian cosmopolitanism is his critique
of Hegel, and thus of the problematic presuppositions of democratic sovereigntism
in modern world society. Despite Adorno’s methodological indebtedness to Hegelian
thinking and, above all, his admiration for Hegel’s political realism,
5
Adorno offers
a profound cosmopolitan critique of the particularism underlying Hegel’s presumed
universalism – an abstract collective particularism which fosters the reified illusion
that human societies are independent from one another.
Two themes are particularly important. First, Adorno points out that the idea of
spirits individualizing themselves in a series of “national spirits” leads Hegel to con-
ceive of collective customs and traditions as “endowed with an absolute right
vis-à-vis actual individuals.”
6
They repress and subsume what is actually concrete,
that is, the plurality of living creatures. Consequently, Hegel’s concept of national
spirits does not do what it pretends to do, namely, engage with particulars. In
fact, the claim that there are “independent” national spirits or cultural identities –
independent not only from each other, but also from individual citizens – is often
used, as Adorno argues in Negative Dialecti cs,to“confer legality upon the rule of
force over individuals, in a way similar to Durkheim’s later use of collective
norms, and to Spengler’s use of the soul of each culture.”
7
National particularism
4
R. Keohane, “Governance in a Partially Globalized World,” American Political Science Review 95.1 (2001): 1–13.
5
R. Fine, “Debating Human Rights, Law, and Subjectivity: Arendt, Adorno, and Critical Theory,” in Arendt and
Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations, ed. L. Rensmann and S. Gandesha (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2012), 154–72.
6
G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1807] 1976);
T. W. Adorno, History and Freedom (Cambridge: Polity Press, [1964–65] 2006), 102. These repressive customs are
by no means as individuated or distinct as Hegel – along with contemporary sovereigntists – suggests.
7
T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, [1966] 1973), 338.
26 LARS RENSMANN
or sovereigntism thus often ends up being just another, thinly veiled, general prin-
ciple that superimposes itself on actual empirical human beings by turning particular
national identities into instances of an all-encompassing “false” universal – an ahis-
torical, abstract and apolitical substrate – that objectifies the subjugation of particu-
lars. The “transposition of the particular into particularity,” Adorno says, “follows
the practice of a society that tolerates the particular only as a category, a form of the
supremacy of the universal.”
8
For Adorno, Hegel thus mystifies the political primacy
of the state over the individual, and the consequences of the structural conflict
between the two. Seen through this lens, the glorification of the nation-state’s collec-
tive particularism, construed as sovereign right, fosters another repressive extrapol-
ation of differences and conflicts: it obstructs universal freedom and replicates the
subjugation of individuals who resist the pressures of collective assimilation to the
general collective norm. Against this, Adorno points out that the predicates of the
extant world, from religion to cultural customs and even political laws, are
thoroughly historical. Today, he argues, they “have not only lost their self-evident
character but that which Hegel took for their substantiality,” which “hopelessly
decayed into that body of customs which was then dug up in the age of dictator-
ships.”
9
This necessitates a “vigorous critique of a politics fetishized into
being-in-itself, or of a spirit bloated in its particularity.”
10
According to Adorno,
Hegel’s claim that no man can “vault the spirit of his people, no more than he
can vault the globe,” reifies the concept of the nation by the illusion of its spirit’s
and its mores’ substantiality, and thus the illusion of its authenticity. Reflected in
contemporary sovereigntist presuppositions, this is “a provincialism in the age of
global conflicts and of a potential global constitution of the world.”
11
Second, while H egel’s sovereigntism denies the internal conflicts between individ-
uals and the state or the collective, it problematically reifies other conflicts that
engender domination: the conflict and separation between sovereign states under
the principles of conventional international law. In Adorno’s view, the nation-state’s
failure to protect those who have been declared a nation’s “existential others” and
“enemies” points to problems intrinsic to the very principle of national sovereignty.
Its fetishization in classical international law shields and thus enables sovereign
nation-states to exercise unlimited “sovereign violence” against “their” own citizens
and denizens. In Adorno ’s view such political violence, accompanied with imperia-
listic injections, reflects the remnants of sovereign national power in a world in
which boundaries between “domestic” and “foreign” have largely become obso-
lete.
12
To be sure, under specific circumstances, Adorno suggests, sovereign
borders may still serve as vehicles for public autonomy, as plural spaces of cultural
8
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 334.
9
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 340.
10
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 323.
11
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 341.
12
Adorno’s critique is shared by Hannah Arendt, who adds that behind all “nationalistic phraseology,”“national sover-
eignty is no longer a working concept of politics, for there is no longer a political organization which can represent a
sovereign people within national boundaries.” Thus the nation-state, “having lost its very foundations, leads the life
of a walking corpse,” in spite of “repeated injections of imperialistic expansion ” (H. Arendt, “The Seeds of a Fascist
International,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitar ianism (New York: Schocken
Books, [1945] 1994), 143).
NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTISM AND GLOBAL CONSTITUTIONALISM 27