Public Philosophy in A New Key

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PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY

VOLUME II
IMPERIALISM AND CIVIC FREEDOM
These two ambitious volumes from one of the worlds most celebrated
political philosophers present a new kind of political and legal theory
that James Tully calls a public philosophy, and a complementary new
way of thinking about active citizenship, called civic freedom. Professor
Tully takes the reader step by step through the principal debates in
political theory and the major types of political struggle today. These
volumes represent a genuine landmark in political theory. In this second
volume, Professor Tully studies networks and civic struggles over global
or imperial relations of inequality, dependency, exploitation and envi
ronmental degradation beyond the state. The final chapter brings all of
the authors resonant themes together in a new way of thinking about
global and local citizenship, and of political theory in relation to it. This
forms a powerful conclusion to a major intervention from a vital and
distinctive voice in contemporary thought.
james tully is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the
University of Victoria, Canada. He is one of the most influential and
distinctive political philosophers writing today.
ideas in context 94
Public Philosophy in a New Key
Volume II: Imperialism and Civic Freedom
I D E A S I N CO N T E X T
Edited by
Quentin Skinner and James Tully
The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of
related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated
will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary
frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of
such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a
new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this
means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various
sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve.
The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation.
A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume.
PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY
IN A NEW KEY
JAMES TULLY
University of Victoria
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521449663
In the collection James Tully 2008
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the
provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part
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First published in print format 2008
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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy

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and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
To Debra
Contents
Volume II
Acknowledgments
Credits
page xii
xiv
introduction
Public philosophy and civic freedom: a guide

to the two volumes
part 1
global governance and practices

of freedom
13
1 The Kantian idea of Europe: critical and cosmopolitan

perspectives
15
2 Democracy and globalisation: a defeasible sketch
43
3 An ecological ethics for the present
73
4 The unfreedom of the moderns in comparison to their ideals of

constitutional democracy
91
part 2
on imperialism
125
5 On law, democracy and imperialism
127
166
Communication and imperialism
7 The imperial roles of modern constitutional democracy

ix
195
Contents
x
conclusion
civic freedom contra imperialism
223
A new kind of Europe? Democratic integration in the

European Union
225
On local and global citizenship: an apprenticeship manual
243
311
351
Bibliography
Index to Volume II
Volume I
Acknowledgments
Credits
xii
xiv
introduction

to the two volumes
pa rt 1
app roa ching practice
13
Public philosophy as a critical activity
15
Situated creatively: Wittgenstein and political philosophy
39
To think and act differently: comparing critical ethos and

critical theory
71
pa rt 2
de mocracy a nd recognition
133
The agonistic freedom of citizens
135
Reimagining belonging in diverse societies
160
Multinational democracies: an introductory sketch
185
Contents
part 3
indigenous pe ople s
xi
221
7 The negotiation of reconciliation
223
8 The struggles of Indigenous peoples for and of freedom
257
co nc lusio n
289
9 A new field of democracy and civic freedom
291
Bibliography
Index to Volume I
317
357
Acknowledgments
There are far too many people who have helped with these two volumes to
mention them individually. Firstly, I would like to thank all the students
who have kept me paddling hard to keep up with their questions and
stimulating research. At the University of Victoria I would like to thank
my colleagues, including staff members, and President David Turpin for
making this university among the best in the world for interdisciplinary
research, teaching and community outreach. I am also pleased to thank the
Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and its former director, Stephen Toope,
for providing a community of engaged fellows and scholars in which many
of my ideas were formulated. I would not have been able to benefit from
a large range of debates without the discussions I have had with scholars
and activists from around the world. I have tried to thank each one of you in
the appropriate chapters. However, I must mention a few to whom I am
exceptionally indebted: Annabel Brett, David Owen, Boaventura de Sousa
Santos, Neil Walker and Antje Wiener.
There is one person without whom this project would have been impossible and to whom I owe my greatest debt. These studies have been written
in continuous conversation with Quentin Skinner. His great insight that
political philosophers are political actors engaged in the problems and
conventions of their age is the starting point of my particular account of
public philosophy. Moreover, his exemplary writing and teaching and his
monumental contribution to European intellectual life have inspired this
whole project.
I am most grateful to Richard Fisher at Cambridge University Press for
his indispensable help, support, encouragement and advice over now many
years of work and friendship. Many thanks go to Mike Simpson for his
careful work on editing and improving the typescript and for helpful
conversations. I also wish to express my gratitude to Jacqueline French
for her exceptional care and proficiency in copy-editing and improving the
final typescript, and Rosanna Christian and Jodie Barnes of Cambridge
xii
Acknowledgments
xiii
University Press for guiding it through the publication process. Finally, I am

pleased to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.
I owe a special kind of debt to the old growth forests of the Pacific
Northwest. As the imperial alliance I write against in Volume II invaded and
occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, these awe-inspiring ecosystems in their
magnificent unity in diversity taught me another, pacific way of being in
the world that could still be ours one day.
Pacific Rim National Park
Credits
The author would like to thank the following publishers for permission to
reuse and rewrite material that originally appeared in their publications.
Volume I
Chapter 1: From Political Philosophy as a Critical Activity, Political Theory
30, 4 (August 2002), republished in Donald Moon and Stephen White,
eds., What is Political Theory? (London: Sage, 2004).
Chapter 2: From Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, in Cressida
Heyes, ed., The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), revised from Wittgenstein and
Political Philosophy, Political Theory 17, 2 (May 1989).
Chapter 3: From To Think and Act Differently: Foucaults Four
Reciprocal Objections to Habermas, in Samantha Ashenden and David
Owen, eds., Foucault Contra Habermas: Continuing the Debate (London:
Sage, 1999).
Chapter 4: From The Agonic Freedom of Citizens, Economy and Society
28, 2 (May 1999).
Chapter 5: From The Challenge of Reimagining Citizenship and
Belonging in Multicultural and Multinational Societies, in Catriona
McKinnon and Iain Hampsher-Monk, eds., The Demands of Citizenship
(London: Continuum, 2000).
Chapter 6: From Introduction, in Alain-G. Gagnon and James Tully,
eds., Multinational Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001).
Chapter 7: From Aboriginal Peoples: Negotiating Reconciliation, in
James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon, Canadian Politics: Third Edition
(Peterborough, OH: Broadview Press, 1999).
Chapter 8: From The Struggles of Indigenous Peoples for and of
Freedom, in Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Sanders, eds., Political
xiv
Credits
xv
Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2000).
Chapter 9: From Recognition and Dialogue: The Emergence of a New
Field, in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 7, 3
(Autumn 2004).
Volume II
Chapter 1: From The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan
Perspectives, in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to
the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Chapter 2: From Democracy and Globalization: A Defeasible Sketch, in
Ronald Beiner and Wayne Norman, eds., Canadian Political Philosophy:
Contemporary Reflections (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Chapter 3: From An Ecological Ethics for the Present, in Brenden
Gleeson and Nicholas Low, eds., Governing for the Environment: Global
Problems, Ethics and Democracy (London: Macmillan, 2000).
Chapter 4: From The Unfreedom of the Moderns in Comparison to
Their Ideals of Constitutional Democracy, Modern Law Review 65, 2
(March 2002), republished in Melissa Williams and Stephen Macedo,
eds., Political Exclusion and Domination (New York: New York University
Press, 2005).
Chapter 5: From On Law, Democracy and Imperialism, in Emilios
Christodoulidis and Stephen Tierney, eds., Public Law and Politics: The
Scope and Limits of Constitutionalism (London: Ashgate, 2008).
Chapter 6: From Communication and Imperialism, in Arthur Kroker
and Marilouise Kroker, eds., The Critical Digital Studies Reader (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2008).
Chapter 7: From The Imperialism of Modern Constitutional
Democracy, in Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker, eds., The Paradox of
Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
Chapter 8: From A New Kind of Europe? Democratic Integration in the
European Union, Critical Review of International Social and Political
Philosophy 10, 1 (March 2007).
Chapter 9 is new. An earlier article from which I have drawn some parts is
Two Meanings of Global Citizenship, in Michael A. Peters, Harry Blee
and Alan Britton, eds., Global Citizenship Education: Philosophy, Theory and
Pedagogy (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008).
Introduction

to the two volumes
Public Philosophy in a New Key is a new approach to the study of politics.

The role of a public philosophy is to address public affairs. This civic
task can be done in many different ways. The type of public philosophy
I practise carries on this task by trying to enter into the dialogues with
citizens engaged in struggles against various forms of injustice and oppression. The aim is to establish pedagogical relationships of reciprocal elucidation between academic research and the civic activities of fellow citizens.
The specific role of this public philosophy is to throw a critical light on the
field of practices in which civic struggles take place and the practices of civic
freedom available to change them. It does this by means of historical and
critical studies of the field and the given theoretical forms of representation
of it. Reciprocally, this critical ethos learns from citizens and the successes
and failures of their civic activities how to improve the historical and critical
studies and begin again.
In the studies that follow, I use the term citizen to refer to a person who
is subject to a relationship of governance (that is to say, governed) and,
simultaneously and primarily, is an active agent in the field of a governance
relationship. While this includes the official sense of citizen as a recognised
member of a state, it is obviously broader and deeper, and more appropriate
and effective for that reason. By a relationship of governance, I refer not
only to the official sense of the institutional governments of states, but to
the broad sense of any relationship of knowledge, power and subjection that
governs the conduct of those subject to it, from the local to the global.
Governance relationships in this ordinary sense range from the complex
ways individuals and groups are governed in their producing and consuming activities to the ways peoples and subalternised states are subject to
global imperial relationships of inequality, dependency and exploitation.
They comprise the relationships of normativity, power and subjectivity in
which humans find themselves constrained to recognise themselves and
each other, coordinate interaction, distribute goods, act on the environment
3
Introduction
and relate to the spiritual realm. Practices of civic freedom comprise the
vast repertoire of ways of citizens acting together on the field of governance
relationships and against the oppressive and unjust dimensions of them.
These range from ways of acting otherwise within the space of governance
relationships to contesting, negotiating, confronting and seeking to transform them. The general aim of these diverse civic activities is to bring
oppressive and unjust governance relationships under the on-going shared
authority of the citizenry subject to them; namely, to civicise and democratise them from below.
What is distinctively democratic about public philosophy in a new key
is that it does not enter into dialogues with fellow citizens under the horizon
of a political theory that frames the exchange and places the theorist above
the demos. It rejects this traditional approach. Rather, it enters into the
relationships of normativity and power in which academic researchers and
civic citizens find themselves, and it works historically and critically on
bringing them into the light of public scrutiny with the particular academic
skills available to the researchers. Every reflective and engaged citizen is a
public philosopher in this sense, and every academic public philosopher is a
fellow citizen working within the same broad dialogue with his or her
specific skills. Studies in public philosophy are thus specific toolkits offered
to civic activist and civic-minded academics working on the pressing
political problems of our times.
I first developed this approach in Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism
in an Age of Diversity. By means of a series of historical studies, I argued that
constitutional democracies could respond to contemporary struggles over
recognition by reconceiving constitutions as open to continuing contestation and negotiation by those subject to them. This would be a transition
from constitutional democracy (where the constitution is conceived as
founding and standing behind democratic activity) to democratic constitutionalism (where the constitution and the democratic negotiation of it are
conceived as equally basic). In the decade since it was published, I have
come to see that this approach can be improved and applied to a broader
range of contemporary struggles: over diverse forms of recognition, social
justice, the environment and imperialism. These two volumes explore this
complex landscape.
Volume I, Part 1 sets out this public philosophy, its employment of
historical studies, its relation to contemporary political struggles and its
orientation to the civic freedom of citizens. Chapter 1 is a sketch of my
approach, the tradition from which it derives, the contemporary authors
from whom I have learned this approach, and a contrast with the dominant
A guide to Public Philosophy in a New Key
theory-building approach. Chapters 2 and 3 provide the groundwork of

public philosophy through an interpretation and adaptation of the works of
Wittgenstein, Foucault and the Cambridge school. These chapters provide
the methods that are employed in the case studies that follow in both
volumes.
Volume I, Part 2 consists of three applications to the democratic struggles
over the appropriate forms of recognition of diverse, multicultural and
multinational citizens in contemporary societies. Chapter 4 locates the
approach relative to trends in political philosophy over the last thirty years
and sketches out the general field of relations of power and the freedom of
citizens that is studied in detail in the following chapters. Chapter 5 is a
study of ways to democratise various types of contemporary recognition
struggles while generating appropriate civic bonds of solidarity among
diverse citizens. Chapter 6 is a study of democratic forms of recognition
in political associations that are not only multicultural but also multinational, based on the work of an international team of social scientists
from the European Union and Canada. This is a comprehensive yet defeasible
analysis of the actual legal and political practices of democratic constitutionalism for multinational associations.
Volume I, Part 3 consists of two studies of the struggles of Indigenous
peoples for recognition in modern states and under international law. The
first sets out a normative framework for the bi-civilisational negotiation of
decolonisation and reconciliation of the rights of Indigenous peoples to
govern themselves in their own ways over their territories and the rights
of states that have colonised them over the last half millennium. It is based
on my work for the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
(19915). Chapter 8 addresses the prevailing discursive and practical
obstacles to the negotiation of reconciliation proposed in Chapter 7 and
the practices of freedom available to Indigenous peoples and their supporters to overcome the obstacles and initiate negotiations.
Chapter 9 concludes Volume I, setting out this new approach to recognition and distribution struggles developed in the course of these studies
and the ways in which contemporary societies are beginning to adopt this
democratic approach in their legal and political institutions. I show how this
approach represents a fundamental transformation of the manner in which
struggles over recognition are standardly conceptualised today in the dominant schools of thought. It recommends a transition from the orientation
to discrete and dyadic struggles for the just and definitive form of legal
recognition in a state to multiple and interrelated negotiations over the
always-imperfect prevailing norms of mutual recognition of members of
Introduction
any form of association. This modest democratic approach has a much

better chance of bringing peace to the deeply diverse world of the twentyfirst century than the standard approaches.
Volume II applies public philosophy in a new key to global politics. It
consists of historical and critical studies of global relationships of horrendous inequality, dependency, exploitation and environmental damage, and
of the corresponding practices of civic freedom of global and local citizens to
transform them into democratic relationships. The transition to Volume II
does not only mark a broadening of the field of public philosophy to the
global. More emphasis is also placed on specific locales of civic struggles, the
diversity of governance relationships and the range of ways of acting otherwise in them, provincialising Eurocentric traditions and bringing in more
non-Western voices and perspectives.
Volume II, Part 1 consists of studies of global relationships and practices of
civic freedom available from the perspectives of the dominant schools of
globalisation. Chapter 1 critically examines the tradition of international
relations and global justice associated with Kants theory of a world federation of identical nation-states. Chapter 2 examines the theories of globalisation, global governance and cosmopolitan democracy. Chapter 3 examines
the activities of environmental movements from the perspective of civic
freedom and advances a democratic ethic of ecological politics. Chapter 4 is
the most comprehensive. It is an immanent critique of the dominant and
agonistic approaches to global justice and international law. The critique
leads step by step to the conclusion that only a more historical and
contextual approach, related to the actual practices of freedom on the
ground, can illuminate the unequal global relationships and the possibilities
for their transformation. The conclusion I draw from these four studies is
that these approaches, while illuminating and useful, are nevertheless
limited and inadequate because they overlook the historically persisting
imperial character of the global relationships they analyse. This provides the
transition to Part 2.
Volume II, Part 2 consists in studies of global relationships under the
description of them as a network of vastly unequal imperial relationships
between the North and global South (the 120 former colonies that comprise
the majority of the worlds population). The three chapters show how
different aspects of the contemporary global order continue to be structured
by imperial relationships inherited from five hundred years of Western
imperialism. These relationships survived decolonisation in the twentieth
century in a new phase of imperialism, standardly called post-colonial or
informal imperialism.
Chapter 5 sets out this argument in historical detail and shows how each
of the major approaches to globalisation and international relations overlooks the imperial dimensions of the present in different ways and marginalises other approaches that study globalisation under the category of
imperialism. Even some of the approaches that claim to take into account
informal imperialism misrepresent the contemporary form of imperialism.
With this disclosure of the field of globalisation as the continuation of
Western imperialism by informal means and through institutions of global
governance, Chapter 6 turns to the networkisation and communications
revolution of the last twenty years. I show that this revolution, which is
often portrayed as democratising globalisation, has been Janus-faced: helping global citizens to organise effectively at the local and global levels, yet
also helping institutions of global governance, multinational corporations
and the US military to network and govern informally the global relationships of inequality they inherited from the period of colonial imperialism.
Chapter 7 shows how the imperial spread of the modular form of modern,
Western-style constitutional nation-states and international law by colonisation, indirect rule and informal rule over the last three hundred years
has not freed the non-West from imperialism. Quite the opposite: it has
been and continues to be the political, legal and economic form in which
relationships of inequality, dependency and exploitation have been extended
and intensified around the world.
Volume II concludes by asking the crucial question: what can citizens
who are subject to these imperial relationships (in both the North and
global South) do to transform them into non-imperial, democratic relationships by bringing them under their shared authority? The general answer
is the exercise of civic freedom by citizens in the North and global South
and the exercise of academic research in networks of reciprocal learning with
these global/local citizen movements: namely, a new public philosophy for
a de-imperialising age. Chapter 8 takes the citizenry of the European Union
as an example. I argue that European citizens are already taking the lead in
improvising new forms of democratising civic activities with respect to
immigration, alternative economics and relationships with the global
South.
Chapter 9 is the conclusion to Public Philosophy in a New Key. It draws
together the strands of argument throughout the two volumes and weaves
them into a sketch of a new kind of local and global citizenship I call glocal
citizenship. This mode of citizenship has the capacity to overcome the
imperialism of the present age and bring a democratic world into being
from the local to the global. Since it is the conclusion to the two volumes,
Introduction
I will provide a brief synopsis at the outset to give a preliminary indication of

where the chapters lead.
The first part of the chapter summarises the imperial character of the
present global order and the dominant modular form of citizenship (modern
citizenship) that has been spread by Western expansion. Far from offering a
challenge to imperialism, it actually serves in a number of ways to extend it,
in both its national (civil) and its global (cosmopolitan) forms. The second
part argues that there is another mode of citizenship (diverse citizenship)
that also developed historically in both the West and non-West. It provides
the democratic means to challenge and transform imperial relationships in
both its local (civic) and local/global (glocal) forms. I set out the main
features of the traditions of diverse civic citizenship historically and conceptually, and then apply it to global struggles of de-imperialisation and
democratisation. It is a form of citizenship that is grounded in local civic
practices yet extended globally by democratic networks. The chapter thus
brings together the three themes of the two volumes: public philosophy,
practices of civic freedom and the countless ways they work together to
negotiate and transform oppressive relationships. This is not only possible
but what millions of citizens, non-governmental organisations (NGOs),
networks and social movements are doing today. The chapter ends with a
view of Gandhis life as a civic citizen contra imperialism; it stands as an
exemplar of civic citizenship and engaged public philosophy.
There are many public philosophers from whom I have drawn inspiration. John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Goldmann, Antonio
Gramsci, Sojourner Truth, Paulo Friere, Bertrand Russell, Maude
Barlow, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Vandana Shiva, Boaventura de
Sousa Santos, Iris Marion Young and Gandhi are exemplary. And, as I
mentioned, every engaged and reflective citizen is an inspirational public
philosopher in this democratic sense. But I have always questioned why
more political philosophers and political theorists are not also public philosophers. What stops many of them from seeing their work as a discussion
with their fellow citizens as equals? I think the answer is that many tend to
enter into a relationship with citizens under the horizon of a political theory
that sets them above the situated civic discourses of the societies in which
they live. This presumptive elevation is standardly based on four types of
assumption.
The first assumption is that there are causal processes of historical
development (globalisation) that act behind the backs of citizens and
determine their field of activity. It is the role of the theorist of modernisation to study these conditions of possibility of civic activity. The second is
that there are universal normative principles that determine how citizens
ought to act. It is the role of the theorist of global justice to study these
unchanging principles that prescribe the limits of democracy. The third is
that there are background norms and goods implicit within democratic
practices that constrain and enable the field of democratic activity of citizens
in the foreground. It is the role of the interpretative and phenomenological
theorists to make these background conditions explicit. The fourth is that
there are canonical institutional preconditions that provide the foundations
of democratic activity and it is the role of political scientists to study these
legal and political institutions.
In each of these four cases, the theorist is elevated above the demos by the
assumption that there are background conditions of possibility of democracy that are separate from democratic activity and it is his or her role to
study them, not what takes places within them. In the course of the studies
in the two volumes, each pillar of elite political theory falls to the ground.
Each of the four conditions of possibility is shown to be internally related to
and reciprocally shaped by the everyday activities of democratic citizens, not
separate from and determinative of their field of freedom. It is this revolutionary discovery that brings political philosophy down into the world of
the demos and renders it a situated public philosophy in conversation with
fellow citizens. Equally important, it enables us to see that we are much freer
and our problems more tractable than the grand theories of the four pillars
make it seem. For while we are still entangled in conditions that constrain
and enable, and are difficult to change, we are no longer entrapped in
background conditions that determine the limits of our foreground activities, for none is permanently off limits. I associate this revolutionary insight
with the late Richard Rorty (Volume I, Chapter 4). Others will associate
it with other writers and their own experiences of human freedom and
agency where they were told it was impossible.
I would like to say a few words about the phrase in a new key. Just as a
jazz musician plays a composition in a new key relative to the classic
performances of it, so too a specific public philosopher plays the role in
his or her own new style in relation to the classic public philosophers in his
or her field. The style of these studies is a new key in that it combines
historical studies and a reciprocal civic relationship in what I hope is a
distinctive way. Jazz musicians play in a new key in the course of improvising with other musicians and in dialogue with classic performances and
present audiences. Analogously, public philosophers improvise in dialogues
with contemporary theorists, the classics, engaged citizens and in response
to the political problems that confront and move them. This is the situated
10
Introduction
freedom of a public philosopher. I see the studies in these volumes as

improvisations in this sense.1
Finally, I would like to respond to a common objection to this style of
public philosophy. Radical critics often say, given the radical character of your
particular public philosophy, why do you engage in the mainstream academic debates and use the conservative language of citizenship, public
philosophy, governance, democracy and civic freedom? Your work will be
co-opted by the mainstream you disagree with and alienated from the civic
activists you hope to reach. You should write in a language of radical politics.
I acknowledge that my views are somewhat radical relative to much of the
literature I discuss. However, there are three reasons for the approach I take.
Firstly, the alternative language of radical politics often involves a kind of
self-marginalisation and an attitude of self-righteousness that I find incompatible with a democratic ethos. Moreover, there are already many excellent
public philosophers, such as Chomsky, who write directly to civic activists
and bypass the theoretical debates, and they too write in the same plain and
simple language of citizens, public goods and freedom. Secondly, the
economic, political and military elites and their ideologists have inherited
not only much of the earth and its resources but also many of its languages,
including the manipulable language of citizenship, democracy, civic goods
and freedom. Yet, it is precisely this ordinary language that the oppressed
and exploited of the world have always used to express their outrage at the
injustices of the present and their hopes and dreams of another world. Like
Edward Said, I refuse to surrender it to our adversaries without a fight and
abandon the repository of the history of struggles from which we derive.2
Moreover, the fall of the four pillars of the ancien rgime also brings down
the fiction of an alternative, pure language of freedom (radical or otherwise)
that stands above the fray of politics and is impervious to unpredictable
redescription by ones fellow adversaries. Thirdly, I have deep respect for the
elaborate Western and non-Western traditions of critical political reflection,
the great yet partial insights they can bring, and the people who carry them
on today in this public language. While I disagree with the dominant
theories that legitimate the status quo in these terms, engagement with
them forces dissenters like myself constantly to test our own views against
them and, in so doing, to try to move the academic debate in another
1
2
For this analogy, see Bruce Ellis Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of
Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Edward W. Said, The Public Role of Intellectuals and Writers, in Humanism and Democratic
Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
11
direction. As we will see, I am far from the first or only one to take this
agonistic stance. Furthermore, is it not presumptuous to assume that these
debates are alien and of no interest to citizens? The following chapters were
written in conversations with engaged citizens. Academic debates are not
as far from and unrelated to the public debates as they are often portrayed
from the perspectives of the four pillars. They are a historically integral part
of the complex field of practical discourses on which public philosophy is
inescapably thrown and in which it can find its voice and make a distinctive
difference.
Except for the concluding chapter of Volume II, all chapters are based on
works published previously over the last eight years and then rewritten to
bring them together in the sustained argument of these two volumes. The
concluding chapter of Volume II was written for the two volumes and to
bring their themes together in a portrait of global/local civic freedom and
public philosophy contra imperialism.
PART
Global governance and

practices of freedom
chapter 1
The Kantian idea of Europe: critical

and cosmopolitan perspectives
introduction
This chapter is the first of several criticisms in this volume of the imperial
dimensions of the Kantian tradition in International Relations, political
theory and practice. It is an immanent critique of what Edward Said called
the pervasive cultural imperialism of Kants theory. This line of criticism
and anti-imperialism derives from Johann Herder, Frantz Fanon, Edward
Said, Charles Taylor and Iris Marion Young. If we take the respect for
cultural diversity and democratic freedom seriously, as I argue in favour
of in Volume I, then we have to criticise and go beyond the imperial,
Eurocentric uniformity of the Kantian framework.1 My thesis is that a
survey of the critical attitude that has developed in response to this tradition
over the last two hundred years will change our idea of Europe and its
relation to the rest of the world, from a Eurocentric to a more pluralistic
conception of cosmopolitanism.2
1 the kantian idea of europe and the world
In The Idea of Europe, Anthony Pagden, Biancamaria Fontana and John
Pocock present a wide variety of ideas of Europe from various ages and go
on to single out the idea associated with Kant and Constant, suggesting that
1
2
See especially Volume I, Chapter 9.

That is, I demur from the suggestion, advanced by many of Kants followers, that his political
philosophy is cosmopolitan. Kant himself claims only that his philosophy has a cosmopolitan intent;
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent, in Perpetual Peace and
Other Essays, ed. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983). This I do not
dispute. For a recent and unmodified claim that Kants political and moral philosophy is cosmopolitan, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism, Journal of Political Philosophy 5(1),
1997: 126.
15
16
Global governance and practices of freedom
it remains relevant today.3 This idea contains five main features. Firstly,
Europe is tending towards a federation of independent or sovereign states,
each and every one of which has what Kant calls a republican constitution:
that is, the formal equality of citizens under the law, the separation of
legislature and executive, and representative government.4 Secondly, the
federation is held together by six preliminary articles, the cosmopolitan right
of universal hospitality (the right of an alien not to be treated as an enemy
on his arrival in anothers country) and commerce or the spirit of trade.5 In
addition, as Fontana emphasises, Constant added the proviso that a degree of
variation in local customs and ways should be tolerated within independent
states.6
Thirdly, the European states and their federation are the prototype for
the development of a federation of all the peoples of the world organised
into identical states.7 The rise and gradual spread of this idea of federation
is, fourthly, understood as the consequence of a set of historical processes
and stages of world development, including the spread of commerce and
the rule of law by European wars of imperial expansion.8 Finally, the rise of
this federal idea is understood to mark the decline of an older and incompatible idea of Europe as the centre of world empires, in the sense of either
European imperialism associated with Napoleon, as Fontana explains, or
earlier ideas of European imperialism based on war, conquest and the
3
See Anthony Pagden, Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent; Biancamaria Fontana, The Napoleonic
Empire and the Europe of Nations; and John Pocock, Some Europeans in Their History, each in
The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays,
pp. 11218. The republican constitution is the first definitive article of peace and the federation of
such states is the second.
Ibid., pp. 10711, 11819, 125. The cosmopolitan right is the means by which commerce is offered to
other nations; Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), p. 158.
Benjamin Constant, The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and Their Relation to European
Civilization, in Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), pp. 738, 14956. Constant realised that his defence of the variety of customs against
uniformity was unpopular, and he believed that the economic and political processes of modernisation
would lead to uniformity in the long run.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, p. 117 (this idea of federalism should
eventually include all nations). See Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain,
Britain and France c.1500c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 190. The federation can
use economic power, rather than war, to force other nations to comply (p. 125).
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, pp. 1205; and Kant, Universal History,
in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. For a recent historical survey and defence of the stages theory of
historical development in Enlightenment thought, see Istvan Hont, The Permanent Crisis of a
Divided Mankind: Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State in Historical Perspective, in
Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State?, ed. John Dunn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
A critique of the Kantian idea of Europe
17
dispossession of Indigenous and other non-European peoples. Kants sketch

of Perpetual Peace in 1795 marks, as Pagden concludes, the transition
from the idea of empire to federation.9 Although Kant uses his federal
ideal to criticise as unjust the earlier imperial spread of European commerce and law-governed colonies by warfare, the federation accepts and
builds on this older imperial foundation, understood as the will or mechanism of nature, and does not permit any resistance to it.10
This idea of Europe and of the world as a European federation writ large
is worth serious consideration because it has played the role of something
like a Kantian regulative ideal over the two centuries since the publication
of Perpetual Peace in 1795. It has come to function as a more or less takenfor-granted normative standard against which many people organise and
evaluate forms of political association in Europe and throughout the world.
Initially, as we have seen, it gave philosophical expression to widely held
assumptions about political association and historical development in
eighteenth-century Europe. Across the Atlantic, James Madison, according
to Nicolas Greenwood Onuf, argued that the federation of the thirteen
Euro-American states in 1787 was modelled on this continental idea of
federation, but that the United States added an Atlantic element of active
republican citizenship which is absent from Kants formulation.11 The
Atlantic element is the republican and neo-roman concepts of freedom,
which involves the civic responsibility to serve the public good through
participation, yet adapted to a federal system in which citizens are represented at both state and federal levels.12 The United States modification
and use of the European idea served in turn as a norm for some of the
9
10
11
12
Pagden, Lords of All the World, pp. 178200. The title of this concluding chapter is From Empire to
Federation.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, pp. 1205, especially 124. Kant explains
this conservative doctrine in The Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 12933. Under no circumstances can any
existing constitutional order be questioned with regard to obedience. Moreover, like many of the
stages theorists of the eighteenth century, Kant apparently believes that legal order and peaceful
relations only arise with sedentary agriculture and trade in any case, so the Indigenous peoples who
hunt, fish and herd have no laws and are the most contrary to a civilised constitution (Perpetual
Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, p. 122 and note).
Nicolas Greenwood Onuf, The Republican Legacy in International Thought (New York: Cambridge
For the neo-Roman concept of freedom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Quentin
Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and for the
civic republican concept of freedom, see John G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine
Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, with a New Afterword, 2nd edition (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003). In contrast to these widespread concepts of republican and neoRoman freedom, Kant defines freedom as the privilege not to obey any external laws except those to
which I have been able to give my consent, yet he calls this republican (Perpetual Peace, in
Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, p. 112 and note).
18
non-Indigenous liberal revolutions in Latin America and, to some degree,

for the federation of the four provinces of Canada in the nineteenth century.
In the early twentieth century, Woodrow Wilsons vision of decolonisation, independent state-building and the League of Nations was informed
by the Kantian idea. As Carl Freidrich argued in Inevitable Peace, the idea
should be seen to play a normative role in the establishment and governance
of the United Nations.13 To come full circle, Fontana and Pagden surely
speak for many when they suggest that the Union of Europe in our time
ought to be viewed in the light of Kants idea of federalism, and so too
does David Held when he sets out his model of cosmopolitan governance
for the planet with reference to Kants Perpetual Peace as his normative
standard.14
2 a critical enlightenment attitude towards
the kantian idea of europe
Without denying its importance, is it nonetheless possible to call this idea
of Europe into question and take up a critical attitude towards aspects of it
and the regulative role it plays in political thought and action? The answer
is yes. Such an attitude has developed in response to the five features of
the Kantian idea over the last two hundred years. A survey of this critical
attitude enables us to see the Kantian idea no longer as a regulative ideal but
as a critical ideal: as one form of organisation of the political field among
many rather than as the framework in which alternatives are evaluated. This
attitude is neither anti-Enlightenment nor post-Enlightenment but a critical attitude that derives from the Enlightenment and finds expression, for
example, in one of Kants works, the essay What is Enlightenment?.15 It is a
form of critical reflection on and test of the habitual and regulative assumptions or, more accurately, limits of the present, including the limits that
Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers claim to have established as beyond
doubt. In the words of Michel Foucault, the critical question that best
13
14
15
Carl J. Freidrich, Inevitable Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948).
David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 22630.
Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. For the
Enlightenment context of this essay, see James Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment? EighteenthCentury Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). For
the interpretation of What is Enlightenment? as initiating a form of critical reflection on the dominant
assumptions of the present, including the assumptions of the Kantian tradition of political philosophy, see Michel Foucault, What is Critique? and What is Enlightenment?, in The Politics of Truth,
eds. Sylvere Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997); and Volume I, Chapter 3.
19
characterises this attitude or ethos is, in what is given to us as universal,

necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?16 This enlightened form
of critical reflection on the federal idea of Europe, therefore, is the application of Kants critical attitude to one of his own ideas that has become a
more or less taken-for-granted assumption of the present.
To begin the historical survey of how the limits of Kants idea of Europe
have been called into question by the practitioners of the Enlightenment
critical attitude of Sapere Aude, recall that his idea is presented as marking a
transition in European political self-understanding from Europe as the
centre of world empires to the centre of a cosmopolitan federation: the
creation, in Pagdens words, of a universal federation bound by common
commercial interests.17 It was not the understanding of Kant and his likeminded contemporaries that federalism would replace the economic relations and constitutional forms spread by the wars of European imperialism
and colonisation but, as we have seen, that independent states and international federalism would be built on this historical foundation.
Notwithstanding this change in European self-understanding, European
imperialism did not decline and federalism develop (despite Kants argument that nature does it herself, whether or not we will it).18 Rather,
European imperialism entered into a second and heightened phase from
1800 to after the Second World War. Consider, Edward Said writes,
that in 1800 Western powers claimed 55 per cent but actually held approximately
35 per cent of the earths surface, and by 1878 the proportion was 67 per cent, a rate
of increase of 83,000 square miles per year. By 1914, the annual rate had risen to
an astonishing 240,000 square miles, and Europe held a grand total of roughly
85 per cent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions and
commonwealths. No other associated set of colonies in history was as large, none so
totally dominated, none so unequal in power to the Western metropolis.19
Although Perpetual Peace played an important role in promoting a form of

post-colonial state-building and international organisation towards the end
of this second and higher stage of imperialism, it is not unreasonable to
question if it has not also played a role in continuing aspects of imperialism,
given the context in which it was written (of the transition from one phase
of imperialism to another) and the apparently uncritical stance the text takes
16
17
18
19
Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, in The Politics of Truth, pp. 1245.

Pagden, Lords of All the World, p. 187.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, p. 123.
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 8.
20
to the possibility of the continuity of underlying forms of economic and

constitutional imperialism. Now, these are exactly the kinds of historical
and contextual questions the practitioners of the Enlightenment critical
attitude, such as Said and Homi K. Bhabha, take up.20 Their writings are
characterised as post-imperial and post-colonial not because they believe
imperialism is over but because they contend that it is necessary to continue
the task of decolonisation by questioning and criticising the vestiges of
imperialism in the received ways of thinking about and organising politics,
especially where these are presented as non-imperial and the imperial setting
of their composition and dissemination is overlooked.
Whether these efforts [of critique] succeed or fail is a less interesting
matter than what distinguishes them, what makes them possible, Said, a
Palestinian-American, writes in his classic study, Culture and Imperialism
(here writing specifically of the United States):
an acute and embarrassed awareness of the all pervasive, unavoidable imperial
setting. In fact, there is no way that I know of apprehending the world from within
American culture (with a whole history of exterminism and incorporation behind
it), without also apprehending the imperial contest itself. This, I would say, is a
cultural fact of extraordinary political as well as interpretative importance, yet it
has not been recognized as such in cultural and literary theory, and is routinely
circumvented or occluded in cultural discourses. To read most cultural decon
structionists, or Marxists, or new historicists is to read writers whose political
horizon, whose historical location is within a society and culture deeply enmeshed
in imperial domination. Yet little notice is taken of this horizon, few acknowledge
ments of the setting are advanced, little realization of the imperial closure is allowed
for. Instead, one has the impression that interpretation of other cultures, texts and
peoples occurs in a timeless vacuum, so forgiving and permissive as to deliver the
interpretation directly into a universalism free from attachment, inhibition and
interest.21
There are of course many aspects of the imperial setting of the Kantian
idea economic, military and geographic that could be and have been
questioned.22 The aspect I wish to survey is cultural, what has come to be
called cultural imperialism. Said characterises it in the following way:
In our time, direct colonialism has largely ended; imperialism . . . lingers where it
has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political,
ideological, economic and social practices. Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a
simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps
20
21
22
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 56.
I discuss these other imperial aspects in Chapters 5 and 7, this volume.
21
impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain

territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowl
edge affiliated with domination: the vocabulary of classic nineteenth century
imperial culture is plentiful with words and concepts like inferior or subject
races, subordinate peoples, dependency, expansion, and authority.23
For, he continues,
a whole range of people in the so called Western or metropolitan world, as well as
their counterparts in the Third or formerly colonized world, share a sense that the
era of high or classical imperialism, which . . . more or less formally ended with the
dismantling of the great colonial structures after World War Two, has in one way
or another continued to exert considerable cultural influence in the present. For all
sorts of reasons, they feel a new urgency about understanding the pastness or not of
the past, and this urgency is carried over into perceptions of the present and
future.24
The new urgency to understand the imperial horizons of European texts

such as Perpetual Peace and the cultural influence they continue to exert in
the present is a critical response to a central problem raised by the struggles
of decolonisation after the Second World War and, in Eastern Europe, after
1989. These struggles and their aftermath did not unfold in accord with
what Kant calls the guarantee of perpetual peace: the tendency to republican constitutions, cosmopolitan federalism and the acceptance of the
existing economic order. Rather, they gave rise to an acute and embarrassed
awareness of the all-pervasive, unavoidable imperial setting of these ideas
and institutions.
In addition to dismantling the formal features of colonialism, the struggles of liberation also aimed to overthrow a form of cultural identity that
had been imposed on the colonised people by the colonisers against their
democratic will and to establish practices of liberty in which they could
invent and discover new identities: through post-colonial nationalism,
then in contestation of the imposed dimensions of that national identity
and, finally, in establishing practices and institutions of liberty.25 In
The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon was one of the first to link
decolonisation clearly with the struggle against the imposed cultural
23
24
25
Ibid., p. 9. For a very good introduction to the field of study of cultural imperialism, see John
Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1991).
For this historical sequence of decolonisation, see Ibid., pp. 23981. For the distinction between
liberation and practices of liberty, see Michel Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a
Practice of Freedom, in The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. I, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 2823.
22
identity of imperialism and then against the pitfalls of national culture.26

This struggle against cultural imperialism consists first and foremost,
according to Fanon, in refusing to imitate precisely the sort of idea expressed
in Perpetual Peace. Let us decide not to imitate Europe, Fanon writes. We
today can do everything so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we
are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe. If all the colonised
people wish to do is to turn Africa into a new Europe then let us leave
the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it
better than the most gifted among us.27 The United States, according to
Fanon, provides an example of what happens when former colonies seek to
imitate Europe:
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It
succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which
the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling
dimensions.28
Rather, the task is to create states, institutions, and societies that do not
draw their inspiration from Europe or the United States. Reversing the
stages view of historical development, he concludes that, if we want
humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different
level than that which Europe has shown it [humanity], then we must invent
and we must make discoveries.29
Fanons point seems to be that dismantling the formal ties of colonialism
through struggles of liberation is a necessary but insufficient condition of
liberty. If the people establish a political association modelled on the
European nation-state, these institutions and practices will serve to impose
a European cultural identity and so continue imperialism by imitation. To
avoid this cultural imperialism and the devastating pathologies associated
with an imposed identity that would linger in the general cultural sphere, it
26
27
29
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). For the status of this text in
the Third World as roughly equivalent to Perpetual Peace in the First World, see Lewis R. Gordon,
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T. White, eds., Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell,
1996); and Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 26778.
Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 31213. 28 Ibid., p. 313.
Ibid., p. 315. Fanons argument here that modern Western humanism or the Enlightenment
philosophy of Man serves to legitimate the violence of cultural imperialism had a large influence
in Europe as well as in the Third World. Jean-Paul Sartre emphasised this theme in his Preface, it was
repeated and extended by Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault investigated the extent to which the
Enlightenment philosophy of Man plays a role in the processes of uniform subjectification and
identity formation within Europe in The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977), and What is Enlightenment?, in The
Foucault Reader.
23
is necessary for the people to establish institutions and practices of liberty in

which they can experiment with both discovering and inventing new
identities.30 I take it that by discover and invent he means that the people
should both draw on Indigenous traditions, customs and ways and innovate
with cultural borrowing and adaptation.
On this account, then, the Kantian idea of free states and federation is
not culturally neutral but is the bearer of processes of a homogenising or
assimilating European cultural identity. As we have seen, Constant saw it
this way as well, as rendering subjects culturally undifferentiated and
uniform. On the contrary, Pagden claims that many of the proponents
of Kantian European and world federalism from Andrew Fletcher to
Woodrow Wilson saw it as culturally pluralist.31 But, those who have
struggled to liberate themselves from imperialism over the last forty years
have tended to agree with Constant and Fanon. They have seen their
struggles as a project to secure not only liberation from a formal colonial
system but also, and just as importantly, the recognition and accommodation of cultural diversity against forms of cultural imperialism imposed by
the very institutions that Kant took to be cosmopolitan.
Moreover, these struggles over the last fifty years do not always involve
the establishment of an independent state through decolonisation or secession, although this is common enough from Algeria and Vietnam to the
break-up of the Soviet Union. These struggles for cultural recognition, as
Charles Taylor points out, just as often take place within existing constitutional states (including within newly decolonised states, as Fanon predicted), to recognise and accommodate a diversity of cultural identities
either in the shared institutions of unitary political associations, as in the
United States, or through institutions of legal and political pluralism in
multiethnic and multinational federations and confederations, as in the
European Union.32 These demands are put forward by Indigenous peoples,
linguistic, religious and ethnic minorities, nations within multinational
30
32
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 20649. 31 Pagden, Lords of All the World, p. 188.
Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of
Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). This collection
provides a good introduction to the politics of recognition or difference. See also Seyla Benhabib,
ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996); Bhabha, The Location of Culture; and Will Kymlicka, Multicultural
Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Said traces the
connection between decolonisation struggles against cultural imperialism in the Third World and the
politics of difference in the First World and Fourth World (Indigenous peoples) in Culture and
Imperialism, pp. 191281.
24
states, immigrants, exiles, refugees and multicultural citizens.33 The aim is

not to overturn but to amend the institutions of constitutional democracy,
so they will express the cultural plurality of the sovereign people, or peoples,
rather than impose the dominant cultures identity while masquerading as
universal and difference-blind.34 Will Kymlicka writes:
Throughout the world, minorities and majorities clash over such issues as language
rights, federalism and regional autonomy, political representation, religious free
dom, education curriculum, land claims, immigration and naturalization policy,
even national symbols such as the choice of national anthem or public holidays.
Resolving these disputes is perhaps the greatest challenge facing democracies
today. In Eastern Europe and the Third World, attempts to create liberal demo
cratic institutions are being undermined by violent nationalist conflicts. In the
West, volatile disputes over the rights of immigrants, indigenous peoples, and other
cultural minorities are throwing into question many of the assumptions which have
governed political life for decades. Since the end of the Cold War, ethnocultural
conflicts have become the most common source of political violence in the world,
and they show no signs of abating.35
Since these struggles against five hundred years of imperialism are only
forty years old, it is too early to say if they will be effective or if they will
simply mark the transition to a third phase of imperialism. Nevertheless,
they have manifestly challenged the purported cultural impartiality and
universality of constitutional states and federations in practice and the
response in theory has been urgent critical reflection on the imperial
setting of one of their most authoritative regulative ideals, the Kantian
idea of Europe. Three cultural aspects of the Kantian idea in particular have
come in for criticism: the conception of cultures, the relation of cultures to
constitutions and federations, and the procedures that render a constitution
impartial and legitimate. I will now survey these criticisms in the present
and their relation to the earlier tradition of an Enlightenment critical ethos
in order to show how they give rise to a distinctive attitude towards, and a
changed understanding of, the idea of Europe.
3 rethinking cultures
As we saw in the first section, the fourth feature of the Kantian idea of
Europe is a background philosophy of world history. This philosophy of
33
34
35
James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge

Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, p. 44.
Will Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 1.
25
history ties all five features of the Kantian idea together into a comprehensive world-view. In Perpetual Peace and Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Intent, Kant lays out his version of the Enlightenment stages
idea of world-historical development. All societies are located on hierarchically arranged levels of historical development. Western European nationstates with their emerging republican constitutions, commerce, inchoate
federal relations, enlightened self-seeking, competitive motivation of unsocial sociability, cultivated civilisation and, finally, intimations of a single
and universal culture and morality are closest to the highest stage, yet only
halfway there:
We are, to a high degree, cultivated beyond bearing by all manner of social con
vention and propriety. But we are a long way from being able to regard ourselves as
moral. For the idea of morality belongs to culture; and yet using this idea only in
references to semblances of morality, e.g. love of honour and outward propriety,
constitutes mere civilization.36
All other societies, with their lower political, economic and cultural ways,
are described and ranked from the standpoint of the European level. The
stage that European societies are approaching of independent nationstates with republican constitutions and one culture and morality in a
federation is universal and cosmopolitan. It is the end-state to which all
others are tending in due course, the level of the development of all the
capacities of the human species, and the level of perpetual peace.37
As the processes of colonial rule and commerce spread around the globe
from the European nations, which will in all likelihood eventually give laws
to all others,38 they stimulate the lower societies to progress in such a way
as to shed their primitive institutions, cultures and different kinds of
historical faiths,39 which were appropriate to their lower stage of development, and either develop into independent states themselves or become
incorporated into the European colonies, which develop into independent
nation-states. Cultures tend to be relative to the underlying stage of political
and economic development, with barbarism and savagism at the inferior,
hunter and gatherer stage and civilisation and refinement at the superior,
commercial stage. The motive of unsocial sociability, which drives the
process of the development of human capacities through individual
36
37
39
Kant, Universal History, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, p. 36.

Ibid., pp. 369 (theses eight and nine). 38 Ibid., p. 38.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, p. 125 note. For Kant there is no religious
or moral pluralism. There is only one religion (and one morality) valid for all men in all times. The
variety of faiths historically can be nothing more than the accidental vehicles of religion and can only
thereby be different in different times and places.
26
competition for honor, power, or property, to secure status among his

fellows, appears to emerge at the transition from shepherding to agriculture
and initiates the first true steps from barbarism to culture:
Without those characteristics of unsociability man would live as an Arcadian
shepherd, in perfect concord, contentment and mutual love, and all talents
would lie eternally dormant in their seed; men docile as the sheep they tend
would hardly invest their existence in any worth greater than that of cattle; and
as to the purpose behind mans creation, his rational nature, there would remain
a void.40
In the same way as antagonisms among competitive individuals within

crude political organisations have the unintended consequence of constructing the foundations of a perfect civil constitution, the antagonism of war
among political organisations leads unintentionally to the development of
federations:
through wars, through excessive and never remitting preparation for war, through
the resultant distress that every nation must, even during times of peace, feel within
itself, they are driven to make some initial, imperfect attempts; finally, after much
devastation, upheaval, and even complete exhaustion of their inner powers, they
are driven to take the step that reason could have suggested, even without so much
sad experience, namely, to leave the lawless state of savagery and enter into a
federation of peoples.41
This course of improvement can be discerned first in the history of the

constitutions of the nations on our continent from the Greeks to the present,
and then used as a guiding thread to clarify and predict the national histories
of other peoples.42 The reason why the process began, spread from, and will
reach its goal first in Europe is the superiority of the national characteristics
of Europeans over other races:
The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world, above all the central part, has a
more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his passions,
more intelligent than any other race of people in the world. That is why at all points
in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons.
The Romans, Greeks, the ancient Nordic peoples, Genghis Khan, the Turks,
40
41
42

Ibid., p. 34 [my emphasis]. Compare Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, p. 121. The
lawless state of savagery underlined in the quotation refers to international relations but also to the
hunter, gatherer and fisher stage of development (Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other
Essays, p. 122 and note).
27
Tamurlaine, the Europeans after Columbuss discoveries, they have all amazed the
southern lands with their arts and weapons.43
This world-view is, as Said puts it above, the vocabulary of classic

nineteenth-century imperial culture. It is imperial in three senses of this
polysemic word. It ranks all non-European cultures as inferior or lower
from the point of view of the presumed direction of European civilisation
towards the universal culture; it serves to legitimate European imperialism,
not in the sense of being right (which Kant roundly denies) but, nevertheless, in being the direction of nature and history and the precondition
of an eventual, just, national and world order; and it is imposed on nonEuropean peoples as their cultural self-understanding in the course of
European imperialism and federalism. Fanons patriotic plea to the Third
World to avoid the imitation of Europe is presumably directed at all three
senses. Decolonisation must not fall into the comprehensive identity given
by this scheme, and thereby continue imperialism by other means of dependency, but must refuse it by exploring alternatives, and so become independent.
The first challenge to Kants idea came from one of his former students,
Johann Gottfried Herder (17441803). In Ideas on the Philosophy of the
History of Mankind (178491), Herder put forth a defence of cultural pluralism.44 He argued that each culture contains its own unique and incommensurable truth or worth, and as such could not be subordinated or
elevated as inferior or superior to another.45 Kant reviewed Herders work
and reasserted his view that all cultures can be ranked relative to a developmental logic and a normative apex. In a particularly revealing passage of
the review (which reasserts the thesis of the Idea for a Universal History),
Kant asks rhetorically:
Does the author really mean that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti, never visited
by more civilised nations, were destined to live in their peaceful indolence for
43
44
45
Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, in Race and the
Enlightenment: A Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 64. Kant
wrote this in 1764, twenty years before the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent.
However, there is nothing in the latter text (or in Perpetual Peace) that repudiates or contradicts his
earlier view on national characteristics and, as we have seen, the whole tenor of the text is
complementary to it (see especially pp. 389). He also continued to write on the racial superiority
of Europeans in 1775 (On the Different Races of Men) and 1798 (Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View). For an introduction to Kants views on race and national characteristics, see Eze, ed.,
Race and the Enlightenment, pp. 19, 3870.
Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie de Geschichte der Menschheit (178491), translated in
part as Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1800).
Eze, ed., the Race and the Enlightenment, p. 65. Compare Charles Taylor, The Importance of
Herder, in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
28
thousands of centuries, it would be possible to give a satisfactory answer to the

question of why they should exist at all, and of whether it would not have been just
as good if the island had been occupied by happy sheep and cattle as by happy
human beings who merely enjoy themselves?46
Herders work challenges two features of the Kantian idea the presupposition that all cultures can be ranked relative to a European norm and
that they all develop (once they come into contact with the more civilised
nations) towards that apex and it presents an alternative attitude of
cosmopolitanism as cultural pluralism: the presumption that all cultures
are of intrinsic worth and that they have their own histories. Herder called
into question the attitude of European cultural superiority informing the
Kantian idea and helped to foster an outlook of cultural pluralism. This
outlook is expressed in early twentieth-century anthropology, the respect
for non-European cultures that began to emerge during decolonisation and
the more recent demands of multiculturalism. As Taylor suggests, the
demands of multiculturalism rest on the premise derived from Herder
that we owe equal respect to all cultures. This is understood as a presumption that cultures are of equal worth. By presumption, he means
that, It is a starting hypothesis with which we ought to approach the
study of another culture. The validity of the claim has to be demonstrated
concretely in the actual study of the culture.47
Notwithstanding, Herder did not question another feature of the stages
view of cultures and constitutions: the idea that each nation has one culture
and that it is independent, separate and internally uniform. Indeed, he may
be said to have put the idea of a national culture on a new and influential
footing. The more recent critics of cultural imperialism have accepted
Herders presumption but challenged his billiard-ball picture of cultures.
They have argued that the culturally complex character of decolonising and
First World nations, the tangled and overlapping struggles for cultural
recognition in all societies today (mentioned by Kymlicka above), as well
as the history of cultural interaction and suppression, all seem to suggest
that cultures are not independent, separate and internally uniform, but
overlapping, interacting and internally contested or negotiated. Moreover,
the multiplicity of cultures does not seem to bear any straightforward
46
47
Immanuel Kant, Review of Herders Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind , in Kants
Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), cited in Eze, ed. Race
and the Enlightenment, p. 70.
Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, pp. 667.
29
relation to constitutional and economic development or to tend to convergence and uniformity. Quite the opposite.48
Consequently, cultures should be seen, in the words of Said, as contrapuntal ensembles.49 The overlapping, interacting and internally negotiated
character of cultures is expressed as a second presumption, of cultural
diversity rather than Herders pluralism or Kants monism. Reflecting on
the cultural diversity and demands for recognition within the emerging
European Union, Jacques Derrida writes that, contrary to both Kant and
Herder, what is proper to a culture is not to be identical to itself . This is not
to say that cultural identity is not important or not to not have an identity,
but to be able to take the form of a subject only in the difference with itself .
There is, he suggests, no culture or cultural identity without this difference
with itself .50 This second presumption is, like the first, a working hypothesis, an attitude one takes to culture, not a preconceived idea to which
reality must correspond. When approaching a culture or any demand for
the acknowledgment of a culture, it instructs us always to ask three questions: Are there other cultures or, recalling Fanon, other activities of cultural
discovery and invention that share the same geographic space and deserve
mutual presumptive respect? Is the culture in question constituted temporally by interaction with other cultures? Are there others who share the
culture in question yet contest the way it is articulated and expressed by
spokespersons claiming to speak for all?51
What are the differences between the attitude towards cultures in the
two presumptions of cultural diversity and in Kants idea of Europe? The
first and most obvious difference is the attitude of presumptive respect for
cultural differences in contrast to the presupposed attitude of cultural
superiority (of Europeans). The second presumption suggests that a
citizen or a people will be the bearer of more than one culture, of multiple
cultural identities, and that this diversity is better approached more as
activities of cultural discovery, invention, reimagination and contestation
in agonistic relation to the powers of cultural imposition and assimilation
48
49
50
51
For Herders view that cultures are separate and incommensurable, see Anthony Pagden, European
Encounters with the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 17281. The change in
the understanding of cultures as overlapping, interacting and internally negotiated is summarised in
Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 1233.
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Todays Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1991), p. 9.
For these three questions, see Tully, Strange Multiplicity, pp. 129.
30
than as a diversity of fixed cultural formations more Dionysian than

Apollonian.52
The third difference is the understanding that culture is closely related to
identity. Kant understood this as well, but he saw cultural identity, except at
the highest stage, as something superficial and irrelevant to ones identity as
a citizen. Ones identity as a citizen is defined in the First Definitive Article
of Perpetual Peace in terms of a metaphysical and universal theoretical
identity, towards which the species is tending, of autonomy: the capacity
of rational agents to direct their lives reflectively in accordance with universal principles. In contrast, cultural identity is seen as an important aspect
of ones practical identity and the appropriate acknowledgment of and
respect for ones practical identity is now seen as relevant to ones identity as
a citizen. Practical identity refers to the aspects of citizens identities that
matter to them, the answer to the question Who are we?, or the structure
of strong evaluations in accord with, and against which, humans live their
lives.53 In an influential and representative analysis, Christine Korsgaard
describes practical identity in the following way:
The conception of ones identity in question here is not a theoretical one, a view
about what as a matter of inescapable scientific fact you are. It is better understood
as a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find
your life worth living and your actions worth undertaking Practical identity is a
complex matter and for the average person there will be a jumble of such con
ceptions. You are a human being, a woman or a man, an adherent of a certain
religion, a member of an ethnic group, a member of a certain profession, someones
lover or friend, and so on. And all of these identities give rise to reasons and
obligations. Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations
spring from what that identity forbids.54
Fourthly, the awareness that the jumble of cultural aspects that make up
ones practical identity matter to ones sense of self-worth has led to the
argument that they require a level of mutual respect in ones society in order
to live the sort of life of self-directed agency presupposed by Kant. This
52
53
54
For one important attempt to work out the implications of this second difference, see William E.
Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
For these ways of characterising practical identity, see Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), pp. 21013; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making
of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 3101; David Owen,
Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault, and the Ambivalence of Reason (London:
Routledge, 1994), pp. 64216.
Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora ONeill (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), p. 101.
31
point has been presented most forcefully by John Rawls, who argues that
self-respect must be seen as a primary good of a liberal society and that selfrespect requires a threshold of mutual acknowledgment and respect of
citizens respectworthy practical identities (or practices of identity formation and reformation).55 As a consequence, Anthony Laden argues, developing Rawls claim, that forms of cultural disrespect, such as racism, sexism
or the a priori ranking of citizens cultures as superior or inferior in
the Kantian scheme, and misrecognition and non-recognition of cultural
differences, such as the suppression and assimilation of minority cultures
and languages, are now seen as serious forms of oppression and injustice, as
undermining the conditions of self-respect required for free and equal
citizenship.56
These four differences mark the fairly widespread transition from and
repudiation of the conception of cultures in the Kantian idea of Europe to
the recognition of the problem of cultural imperialism and the exploration
of the two presumptions of cultural diversity, not only between the so-called
First and Third Worlds, but within European and North Atlantic societies
themselves. This change in outlook is in part the achievement of the critical
Enlightenment attitude and, in particular, Fanons contribution to it.
Nevertheless, one could agree that this is a change in the understanding
of cultures from the one in Kants idea of Europe but deny that it entails any
change in what is really essential to the Kantian idea: the concepts of
constitutions and federations. It is to this that we now turn.
4 rethinking constitutions and federations
Recall that on Kants account the constitution of every free and independent nation-state should be the same. The constitution is republican and
this means that it treats each citizen the same, as free and equal. Rightful
equality, Kant explains, is that relation among citizens whereby no citizen
can be bound by a law, unless all are subject to it simultaneously and in the
very same way.57 This idea of equality gives expression to the principle that
all humans are equally worthy of respect in virtue of their status as rational
agents with the capacity for autonomy. To recognise citizens as equals in
this sense involves treating them impartially (in the very same way) and,
55
56
57
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 4401.
See Anthony Laden, Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). There are well-known limits to Rawls respect for diversity. See
Chapter 4, this volume.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, p. 112, note [my emphasis].
32
so Kant thought, in a difference-blind manner. It is standardly expressed in

individual rights and duties, formal equality before the law and the principle
of non-discrimination. The upshot of the change in understanding of
cultures is that there is another aspect under which humans ought to be
recognised and respected as equals: their capacity to form, contest and
transform practical identities or identity-related cultural differences as
individuals and as members of cultural groups. However, the presumption
of the equal recognition and respect for cultural differences, which, as we
have seen, seems to follow from recognition of the equal capacity to form
such cultural differences, comes into conflict with the presumption of
equality as impartiality or difference blindness, which seems to follow
from the equal capacity for autonomy. The tension between these two
kinds of equality of respect and recognition, which are both equally well
grounded in the values of modern politics, can be formulated in a number
of different ways.58
The first and most Kantian resolution is to argue that the recognition
and respect for cultural differences takes place outside the political realm, in
the realm of ethics and self-esteem, whereas citizens are recognised and
accorded respect solely under the description of impartial equality: that is, as
bearers of identical rights and duties.59 It is certainly true that many cultural
differences and forms of multiculturalism can be treated fairly in this way.
Citizens can express and contest many aspects of their practical identities
while exercising the rights and duties of impartial equality in the same way
and fight against various forms of cultural imposition and disrespect, such as
sexism, racism and cultural denigration, by the application of the principle
of non-discrimination, as, for example, Jeremy Waldron has asserted.60
However, there are many cases where the two aspects of equality cannot
be separated in this way into two mutually exclusive categories; where the
equal recognition and respect for cultural differences involves some conflict
with the Kantian idea of a constitution based solely on impartial equality. As
Taylor neatly summarises the conflict:
58
59
60
For this formulation of the debate between Kantians and their critics as a question of the relation
between two kinds or aspects of equality of recognition and respect, rather than as equality versus
difference, see Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, pp. 413.
This is the response associated with Jrgen Habermas in, for example, Moral Consciousness and
Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). For a historical account from Kant to the
present, see Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
Jeremy Waldron, Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative, in The Rights of Minority
Cultures.
33
These two modes of politics, then, both based on the notion of equal respect, come
into conflict. For one, the principle of equal respect requires that we treat people in
a difference blind fashion. The fundamental intuition that humans command this
respect focuses on what is the same in all. For the other, we have to recognize and
even foster particularity. The reproach the first makes to the second is just that it
violates the principle of nondiscrimination. The reproach the second makes to the
first is that it negates identity by forcing people into a homogeneous mold that is
untrue to them. This would be bad enough if the mold were itself neutral
nobodys mold in particular. But the complaint generally goes further. The claim
is that the supposedly neutral set of difference blind principles of the politics of
equal dignity is in fact a reflection of one hegemonic culture. As it turns out, then,
only the minority or the suppressed cultures are being forced to take alien form.
Consequently, the supposedly fair and difference blind society is not only inhuman
(because suppressing identities) but also, in a subtle and unconscious way, itself
highly discriminatory.61
Such conflicts constitute one of the central problems of the present.

Perhaps it is enough to say that the problem cannot even be formulated
in the terms of the Kantian idea of Europe to show how the understanding
of constitutional essentials has been modified by the changed understanding of cultures. However, it is possible to mention briefly how the Kantian
idea of a constitution and a federation has been amended in two types
of case.
John Stuart Mill was one of the first to suggest how the Kantian idea of
equality should be amended to take into account such cases. He argued
that the a priori presumption should remain in favour of impartiality and
the law should treat all alike, except where dissimilarity of treatment is
required by positive reasons, either of justice or of policy.62 In the first type
of case, citizens reason that they cannot exercise the rights and duties of
impartial equality and so participate in the public and private life of their
constitutional association without injustice unless they are allowed to
exercise them in ways that recognise and accommodate, rather than misrecognise and denigrate, their cultural differences. The relevant cultural
difference may be linguistic, religious, gender, ethnic and so on. This is not
a challenge to the shared rights, duties and institutions associated with
61
62

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, in Three Essays (London: Oxford University Press,
1975), pp. 4289. Of course Mill argues that no reasons of justice or policy advanced to treat women
dissimilarly by subordinating them to men are convincing. Nevertheless, he introduces the proviso
that impartial equality can be amended if reasons for dissimilar treatment of some citizens that does
not involve subordination can be made good. This is what recent feminists have argued, for purported
impartial public norms often embody a male norm.
34
impartial equality but only to the requirement that all exercise them always
in the very same way.63
The positive reasons advanced for this dissimilarity of treatment often
appeal to the very value of impartial equality that was thought to entail
difference blindness. If, under the rubric of impartial equality, a constitution upholds one public language, statutory holidays that coincide with one
religion, public practices that uphold a male norm, public education that
upholds one historical narrative, and so on, then the constitution, while
treating everyone in the very same way, does not treat them impartially. It
is partial to, and serves to impose, one culture at the expense of subordinating and assimilating all others to some extent. To be impartial in all such
cases, the constitution cannot be difference-blind, which is impossible in
these cases, or difference-partial, as it is by upholding one set of dominant
cultural differences while pretending to be impartial; rather, it must be
difference- or diversity-aware: that is, accord equal due recognition and
respect, in some way, to the respectworthy cultural differences of all citizens.
This is the same structure of argument against cultural imperialism we saw
earlier with Constant and Fanon, but now advanced by the culturally
diverse citizens of contemporary societies. Alternatively, it has been argued
by Kymlicka that the due recognition and respect for the cultural differences
of citizens is a necessary condition of the exercise of the capacity for
autonomy that impartial equality is meant to secure. In these and other
ways, the idea of a constitution in the Kantian idea has been modified from
within to include, as a matter of justice, the equality of respect for cultural
diversity.64
The second and stronger type of case is where citizens reason that the
equal recognition and respect of their cultural identities requires as a matter
of justice different institutions of self-government: that is, forms of legal and
63
64
It must be noted that Mills political theory is a theory of European imperialism over the nonEuropean world and that he would not have applied this difference and non-subordination principle
outside of Europe. He argued that non-Europeans should be subordinate and, in most cases,
governed despotically. See Jennifer Pitts, The Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in
Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), and for a comprehensive account of
Millian liberal imperialism, Timothy Eric Smith, JS Mill and Liberal Imperialism: The Architecture
of a Democratization Theorem (MA thesis, University of Victoria, 2007). My point is that there are
resources within liberalism to criticise and overcome its cultural imperialism if self-critical liberal
theorists wish to do so. See James Tully, Ethical Pluralism and Classical Liberalism, in The Many and
the One: Religious and Secular Perspectives on Ethical Pluralism in the Modern World, eds. Richard
Madsen and Tracy B. Strong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
The literature is vast. See, for example, Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism; Will Kymlicka, Liberalism,
Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) and Multicultural Citizenship. In this and
the second type and case, I set aside arguments that appeal to the equal respect for cultural differences
as a value in its own right.
35
political pluralism that accord with cultural differences by means of devices

of subsidiarity, devolution, regional autonomy, federalism and confederalism within a larger constitutional association. This demand conflicts with
a second principle of a republican constitution according to Kant, the
principle of the dependence of everyone on a single, common [source of]
legislation (as subjects).65 In multiethnic and multinational constitutional
associations, the positive reasons for this second type of dissimilarity of
treatment have been similar to those advanced by Constant immediately
after the publication of Perpetual Peace, or they have been analogous to the
ones advanced in the first type of case: that participation in the same
legislative body in all matters would involve some degree of cultural imperialism. The consequence is that citizens are dependent on more than one
common source of legislation (regional, provincial, national, federal, etc.)
and the powers of these legislative assemblies are not ordered in a single
hierarchy. The resulting form of federalism differs in two fundamental
respects from Kants idea of federalism: it can occur within as well as
among constitutional associations, and it is based on the recognition and
respect of cultural diversity rather than on cultural uniformity.66
One of the best examples of both types of case (diverse constitutionalism
and federalism) is arguably the very organisation that was supposed to unfold
in accord with the Kantian idea, the European Union. Another example
which exposes the limitations of Kantian constitutionalism and federalism is
the demand of the Aboriginal peoples of the world to free themselves from the
internal colonialism imposed on them over the last five hundred years by the
former colonies of European imperialism and to govern themselves in their
own constitutional associations. As we have seen, the Kantian idea locates
these peoples at the lowest, hunting and gathering, stage, without laws and
property, and (as in all cases), without a right to challenge the system of laws
imposed on them by the European settler states:
A people should not inquire with any practical aim in view, into the origin of the
supreme authority to which it is subject, that is, a subject ought not to rationalize for
the sake of action about the origin of this authority, as a right that can still be called
into question [ius controversum] with regard to the obedience he owes it. For, since a
65
66
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, p. 112.

For the EU, see Richard Bellamy, The Constitution of Europe: Rights or Democracy, in Democracy
and Constitutional Culture in the Union of Europe, ed. Richard Bellamy (London: Lothian
Foundation Press, 1996). The literature on this second type of case is also vast. See Kymlicka, ed.,
The Rights of Minority Cultures, and Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship; Iris Marion Young, Justice
and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Laden, Reasonably
Radical.
36
people must be regarded as already united under a general legislative will in order to
judge with rightful force about the supreme authority, it cannot and may not judge
otherwise than as the present head of state wills it to. Whether a state began with an
actual contract of submission as a fact, or whether power came first and law arrived
only afterward, or even whether they should have followed in this order: For a
people already subject to civil law these rationalizations are altogether pointless and,
moreover, threaten a state with danger.67
Once this is settled, Aboriginal peoples have no appeal for the recognition
and protection of their cultures and Aboriginal rights, for, as we have seen,
they face assimilation under the Kantian idea of equality, which decrees
their subjection to non-Aboriginal legislative authority in the very same
way as every other citizen.
Of course, this dimension of the Kantian idea has always been contested
by Aboriginal peoples themselves, and they continue to challenge it in the
courts and legislatures of Canada, the United States, Australia and New
Zealand, and in international law today.68 In addition, it was forcefully
challenged from within the Enlightenment tradition of constitutionalism
by John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States,
in the early nineteenth century. Like Herder, he repudiated the stages view
on which it is based and reasoned that Aboriginal peoples should be
recognised and respected as equal: that is, as self-governing nations, equal
in juridical status to European nations. As he famously wrote:
America, separated from Europe by a wide ocean, was inhabited by a distinct
people, divided into separate nations, independent of each other and the rest of
the world, having institutions of their own, and governing themselves by their
own laws.69
As a result, Marshall goes on to conclude, the just establishment of nonAboriginal constitutional states in America requires the consent of the
Aboriginal nations acquired through nation-to-nation treaties, thereby giving rise to a treaty-based federalism between self-governing, coexisting
Aboriginal nations and the American (and Canadian) governments.70
Abandoning Kants understanding of cultures in this case, therefore,
entails overriding two central features of Kantian constitutionalism and
federalism: the difference-blind application of his principle of equality and
the principle of citizens dependence on a single, common source of
67
68
69
70
Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 12930.

See Royal Commission of Aboriginal Peoples, Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples,
5 Vols. (Ottawa: Canada Communication Group Publishing, 1996), especially Vols. I and II.
John Marshall, CJ, in Supreme Court of the United States, Worcester v. the State of Georgia, pp. 4267.
Ibid., pp. 435, 445. See Tully, Strange Multiplicity, pp. 11738.
37
legislation, for Aboriginal peoples are dependent first and foremost on their
own legislation and the source of this legislative authority is not the United
States nor the Canadian Constitution, but the status of Aboriginal peoples
as self-governing nations prior to the arrival of Europeans. Moreover, this
line of argument has been extended to question the underlying Eurocentric
direction of constitutional and federal development in Kants framework. A
number of scholars and the United States Senate have argued that the
federation of the United States was influenced not only by European and
Atlantic ideas of federalism but also by the federation of the five Iroquois
nations. Other scholars have gone on to suggest that the Iroquois federation
and its constitution, the Great Law of Peace, is a better heuristic for global
federalism than the Kantian idea precisely because it respects and recognises
cultural diversity.71
5 from monologue to cosmopolitan multilogue
As a result of this survey, it appears that the Enlightenment critical attitude
towards the problem of cultural imperialism has been able to call into
question and modify all five features of the Kantian idea of Europe and
the world. However, recall the line of argument. Two presumptions
regarding the equality of respect for cultures gave rise to three questions
and four differences with respect to Kants understanding of cultures. It
followed from these presumptions, questions and differences that Kants
ideas of constitutions and federations should be amended, specifically
the ideas that equality always entails difference-blind treatment and that
there must be one locus of authority in a constitutional association. These
amendments lead to the justification of two non-Kantian types of case:
where citizens share the same rights and institutions yet exercise and
participate in them in different ways (diverse constitutionalism), and
where citizens require a plurality of legal and political institutions (diverse
federalism) in order to accord equal respect to the diversity of their cultural
similarities and differences.
71
Jos Barriero, ed., Indian Roots of American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Aewkon and Cornell University
Press, 1988); Robert W. Venables, American Indian Influences on the America of the Founding
Fathers, in Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations, and the U.S. Constitution, ed.
Oren Lyons (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1992); and Iris Marion Young, Hybrid Democracy:
Iroquois Federalism and the Postcolonial Project, in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples, eds. Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000). For a careful treatment of the demands for recognition of Aboriginal peoples and the principles
of liberal democracy, see Michael Murphy, Nation, Culture and Authority: Multinational
Democracies and the Politics of Pluralism (Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University, Montreal, 1997).
38
These rather dramatic changes in the understanding of the principles and

practices of constitutions and federations rest entirely on two presumptions that the cultural differences in question are worthy of respect. The
changes should be accepted if and only if the two presumptions can be made
good. We have assumed this for the sake of the argument, but the point
of describing them as presumptions is precisely to flag that they are open
to question. So, the two-part question is, How is it to be decided if a
presumption of equal respectworthiness for identity-related cultural difference is valid and, if so, what kind of constitutional or federal recognition
is due? The answer to this question marks the final and most important
change in the understanding of constitutions and federations brought about
by the Enlightenment critical attitude.
Kants answer is, as we have seen, that he decides. Firstly, he judged the
relative worth of the cultures of the world and ranked them relative to his
background Eurocentric philosophy of history. Secondly, he determined
the corresponding essentials for all legitimate constitutions and federations
(by means of his transcendental principle of publicness that functions
like the test of universalisation and non-contradiction in morality).72 The
very idea that the question can be answered in this way, monologically and
comprehensively, has come to be challenged as yet another dogma of
cultural imperialism.
Take first of all the question of the validity of the presumption of equal
value of a culture or cultural difference. A necessary condition of reaching
an impartial answer is that we enter into dialogue with members of the
culture in question. Drawing again on Herder and the tradition of cultural
hermeneutics that developed in part from his work, Taylor explains why
cross-cultural dialogue is necessary:
We may have only the foggiest idea ex ante of in what its valuable contribution
might consist. Because, for a sufficiently different culture, the very understanding
of what it is to be of worth will be strange and unfamiliar to us. We learn [by
dialogue] to move in a broader horizon, within which what we have formerly
taken for granted as the background to valuation can be situated as one possibility
alongside the different background of the formerly unfamiliar cultures. The fusion
of horizons operates through our developing new vocabularies of comparison, by
means of which we can articulate these contrasts. So that if and when we ultimately
find substantive support for our initial presumption, it is on the basis of an
72
Kant, On the Agreement Between Politics and Morality According to the Transcendental Concept
of Public Right, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970).
39
understanding of what constitutes worth that we couldnt possibly have had at the
beginning.73
If Kant had entered into dialogue with members of the cultures he ranked
monologically, he could have opened himself to broadening his horizon by
seeing it (the idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan intent) as one
background of valuation among many, and entered into the difficult but
rewarding activity of comparing the worth and public respectworthiness of
European and non-European cultures and their internal diversity in a
genuinely cosmopolitan way. This activity would change not only his
understanding of other cultures but also his idea of Europe itself.74
Since citizens themselves are required to accord the appropriate mutual
respect to each others respectworthy cultural differences (for the reasons
given above by Rawls), it follows that citizens must engage in this kind of
intercultural and agonistic dialogue. Given the need to test the second
presumption of cultural diversity in the course of the dialogue, the dialogue
is properly called a multilogue. Such a public multilogue can be thought of
as a reformulation of Kants ideal of public enlightenment in the face of
cultural diversity. Although the persons who decide the second part of the
question (what kind of constitutional or federal recognition is due?) must
engage in the multilogue to determine which cultural differences are candidates for constitutional recognition (i.e. are worthy of respect), must all
citizens reach agreement on the second part of the question or can it be
decided by a few? The answer given by Kant is that a few can decide questions
of constitutional essentials as long as they are compatible with their being
made public (the test of public reason) and citizens on individual reflection
are able to give their consent (the test of external freedom).75
However, this monological feature of Kantian constitutionalism and
federalism has been challenged from within the Kantian tradition, by
John Rawls and Jrgen Habermas. Both argue that Kants monological
test of public reason and external freedom is insufficient to ensure impartiality and justification. It is through an actual dialogue in which equal
citizens exchange public reasons in order to reach mutual understanding
and agreement on constitutional essentials, Habermas explains, in explicit
contrast to Kant, that partialities can be exposed and overcome and the form
73
74
75

For the logic of this kind of intercultural and agonistic multilogue, see Volume I, Chapters 7 and 9.
Kant, On the Agreement Between Politics and Morality, p. 125, and Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual
Peace and Other Essays, p. 112 note.
40
of consent required for public justification achieved.76 The dialogical

reformulation of the demands of an ideal of public reason and freedom is
presented by Habermas in terms of principle D: Only those norms can
claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected
in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse.77 Since citizens begin
the public discussion on constitutional essentials from within their various
cultural understandings, the two-part question (relating to the respectworthiness of citizens cultural differences and their appropriate form of
recognition) is raised and addressed in the same practical discourse:
The descriptive terms in which each individual perceives his interests must be open
to criticism by others. Needs and wants are interpreted in the light of cultural
values. Since cultural values are always components of intersubjectively shared
traditions, the revision of the values used to interpret needs and wants cannot be a
matter for individuals to handle monologically.78
This change in the understanding of constitutionalism can be seen as a

reformulation of the ideal of public reason in order to place the constitutional rule of law on equal footing with the democratic idea of the sovereignty of the people who impose the constitution on themselves. The thesis
that the rule of law and democracy (or self-rule) are co-equal principles,
associated in European theory with Locke and Rousseau, has come to be
widely accepted in the twentieth century despite Kants objections to it. On
this understanding, a constitution or a federation rests on the agreement of
the sovereign people reached through processes of deliberation or what is
now called democratic constitutionalism.79 A cultural difference is worthy
of respect and some form of recognition if it can be shown to be reasonable. It is reasonable if through the exchange of public reasons among free
76
77
78
79
See Jrgen Habermas, Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification, in Moral
Consciousness and Communicative Action; Habermas, Reconciliation Through the Public Use of
Reason: Remarks on John Rawlss Political Liberalism, Journal of Philosophy 92(3), 1995: 10931; and
Rawls, Reply to Habermas, in Political Liberalism; John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005).
Habermas, Discourse Ethics, p. 66. The role of dialogue in overcoming partiality and securing
consent based on conviction is on pp. 667. Habermas interprets Rawls theory here as monological
like Kants. Rawls corrects him on this in Reply to Habermas and clarifies his own conception of
public dialogue on constitutional essentials. For the limitations of both theories see Chapter 4, this
volume.
Ibid., pp. 678.
See Habermas, Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason, Journal of Philosophy 92(3), 1995: 12631;
John Rawls, Political Realism: Reply to Habermas, Journal of Philosophy 92(3), 1995: 1617; and Habermas,
Popular Sovereignty as Procedure, in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law
and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 46390. For Kants objection that popular
sovereignty is self-contradictory, see The Metaphysics of Morals, p. 130.
41
and equal citizens the cultural difference in question can be made good to
citizens generally. In the exchange of public reasons, citizens accept the
burdens of judgment associated with freedom and equality in conditions of
cultural diversity or reasonable pluralism: the awareness of and respect for
those identity-related cultural differences that are compatible with reaching
agreement on a shared identity as citizens.
The changed understanding of constitutionalism, Laden explains, is a
matter of rejecting the view that a conception of citizenship is worked out
ahead of time, based on supposedly universal principles, and then arguing
that any identities with non-political aspects which are incompatible with
this notion of citizenship are unreasonable, and complaints about the
burdensomeness of citizenship from their perspectives are not legitimate
charges of injustice. Rather,
We start not from a conception of citizenship, but from an ideal of society
ordered by a shared will formed through a process of reasonable political delib
eration. The realization of that ideal involves members of the society coming to
construct a political identity they can share despite their other differences. We
call that identity citizenship, and try to work out some of its basic features
given the role it plays in securing the possibility that deliberation could construct
such a shared will. Freedom and equality come in to its characterization in this
fashion.80
In his early presentation of principle D, Habermas appeared to hold that

cultural differences would be filtered out in the course of the dialogue, by
processes of generalisation and role-taking, and citizens would reach agreement on a difference-blind constitution.81 However, as the critical response
to Habermas has shown, this reintroduction of difference-blind equality as
the regulative ideal of discourse cannot be sustained. If citizens take into
account the culturally different or concrete other, as well as the generalized other, in the course of their deliberation, as they must, then there is no
reason in principle why citizens may not be able to give good public reasons
for the respect for and public recognition of those differences in diverse
forms of constitutions and federations: reasons that are not particular to
the members of that culture but are based on considerations of justice,
freedom, equality, non-subordination and so on that are shared by citizens
80
81
Anthony Laden, Constructing Shared Wills: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity
(Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1997), pp. 3389.
Habermas appears to modify his earlier view to some extent, perhaps in response to the critical
literature, in Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State, in Multiculturalism,
and Citizenship and National Identity, in Between Facts and Norms, pp. 491516.
42
generally.82 Furthermore, as Iris Marion Young has gone on to argue, if

citizens are to treat each other equally in the discussion itself, they will have
to recognise that Habermas form of public argumentation itself is not
impartial but culturally particular and thus accept culturally different
forms of argumentation. In these and other ways, the imperial aspects of
the early formulation of principle D can be and have been exposed and
corrected, making way for a post-imperial and genuinely pluralistic conception of the critical exchange of public reasons among free and equal
citizens and peoples as the basis of constitutionalism and federalism.83
conclusion
This brief survey of the criticism of the Kantian idea of Europe and the
world over the last two hundred years has sought to show that the idea is not
as cosmopolitan as Kant intended it to be. His conceptions of cultures,
constitutions and federations, and the procedures of constitutional legitimation are partial in one way or another, and, as a result, they continue
cultural imperialism when they are treated as if they were universal. The
critical survey was not restricted to this negative Socratic task of showing
that Kants idea of Europe and the world does not possess the cosmopolitan
status it intends to possess. The Enlightenment critical attitude is often
criticised for being only negative, for failing to put forward an alternative. In
response to this objection, the survey has also sought to show how a
different way of thinking about and acting in relation to the cultures,
constitutions and federations of Europe and the world has been developed
in the course of the two hundred years of criticism. This is furthermore a
way of thinking and acting that appears to be less imperial and more
cosmopolitan, and perhaps more peaceful, than the Kantian idea that it
simultaneously respects and challenges, as I argue in the following chapters.84
82
83
84
See Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics
(London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 14877.
Young, Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy. See Volume I, Chapter 3
for Youngs argument and Chapters 4 and 5, this volume, for deeper criticisms and alternatives.
This attitude of both respecting and challenging the prevailing forms of thought and action in the
present is the Enlightenment critical attitude. See Volume I, Chapter 1.
chapter 2
Democracy and globalisation:

a defeasible sketch
introduction: a political philosophy

of the present
In this chapter I extend my investigation of the anti-imperial critical ethos in
Chapter 1 by introducing two ways of studying globalisation and democratisation. The first is by means of restrictive practices of governance and
practices of democratic freedom (or democratisation). I argue that the global
governance and cosmopolitan democracy approaches to globalisation are
examples of this restrictive way (often referred to as globalisation from
above). The second is by means of extensive practices of governance and
democratic freedom. This way is particularly effective in throwing light on
globalisation and democratisation from below and its possibilities for deeper
democratisation. The chapter draws on my development of this practicebased approach to government and freedom in Volume I, Chapters 13 and
begins the application of it to globalisation in the following chapters. I open
by situating my particular public philosophy approach in the critical tradition
from which it derives.
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By
philosophys grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of
Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.1
Recall that in this famous conclusion to the Preface of the Philosophy of

Right, Hegel advances two closely related claims about the relation between
political philosophy and political practice. Only when an organised form of
political life has come to maturity and grown old can it be given adequate
expression by means of philosophical reflection. Philosophy appears only
when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation
has been completed.2 At the same time, this philosophical reflection is
1
2
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 13.
Ibid., pp. 1213.
43
44
provoked by a new and different form of political life coming into being out
of the old. While the philosopher cannot help but notice this dawning
activity, for it renders the present problematic and gives rise to critical
reflection, he or she cannot grasp it adequately because it is different
from, and often disruptive of, the shape of life in its twilight, which he or
she paints so perspicuously in shades of grey. To use Hegels example, while
Plato adequately articulated the mature Greek political and ethical life in the
Republic, he noticed but failed to understand adequately an emerging style
of politics that was breaking into that life in his own time and which would
change the old ways forever.3 This was a deeper principle, the free infinite
personality: that is, the new form of political and ethical life based on
parrhesia modes of questioning oneself and other citizens exemplified by
Socrates.4 Plato failed to understand adequately the new way of being
political not only because it was new and inchoate, but also because he
tried to master or comprehend it in the concepts appropriate to the old and
thus did fatal injury to the deeper impulse which underlay it.5 He could see
what Socrates had introduced only as a longing still unsatisfied not as a
principled mode of being open to philosophical comprehension.6
We are in an analogous situation today with respect to the puzzling kinds
of democratic activity that are emerging in the context of globalisation. We
can see that they embody a longing still unsatisfied, but when we try to
reflect critically upon them we misunderstand. We tend to characterise and
seek to master them in the concepts, theories and traditions that are
appropriate to the democratic practices and institutions that have come to
maturity and grown old over the last two hundred years and in which we
ourselves think and act. Alternatively, as Hegel explains, if we try to grasp
and anticipate what is happening here and now in some new normative
vocabulary, this too is bound to fail since we cannot jump over Rhodes;
transcend our contemporary world.7 The result is groundless and idle
speculation about the future, the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist,
God knows where, and where anything you please may, in fancy, be
built.8
3
6
Ibid., p. 10. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

Ibid. Hegel argues that despite this lack of philosophical comprehension, Platos peculiar genius
somehow enabled him to present a political theory that nevertheless turned on the revolutionary
principle Socrates embodies (Ibid., p. 10). This back-handed compliment seems to be a desperate
attempt by Hegel to save his account of philosophical understanding. A simpler explanation is that
there is another mode of philosophical understanding of the present, outlined below, which Plato
exhibited in the to-and-fro movement of his dialogues.
Ibid., p. 11. 8 Ibid., pp. 10, 11.
Democracy and globalisation: a defeasible sketch
45
Certainly these two genres of contemporary political thought the

re-inscription of the new in terms of the old and the idle speculation
about the future are common enough, especially at the beginning of a
new millennium. Nevertheless, since the time of the young Hegelians a
third school of political philosophy has developed in response to Hegels
conservative pessimism about understanding what is happening right now,
and it has established itself on the rough ground between his two extremes.
From Kants 1784 essay What is Enlightenment?, Marx, Nietzsche and
Weber to Arendt, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Taylor, Giddens, Connolly and
Skinner among others, this form of critical reflection on the present seeks to
understand a new and problematic way of acting or language game (class
struggle in the workplace, post-Christian ethics, the ascetics of capitalist
behaviour, an enigmatic aspect of freedom) in terms of neither the dominant, cut and dried political institutions and traditions nor some new and
fanciful vocabulary, but, rather, in terms of a relation of difference, of
dissimilarity, relative to the dominant institutions and their traditions of
thought. What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?,
as Foucault succinctly summarises this whole orientation.9 This careful,
back-and-forth reciprocal elucidation of an unsettling political activity of
the present in terms of its difference from, as well as similarity to, the
prevailing forms of political thought and practice not only discloses the
anomalous activity in a distinctive light; it also shows us these old forms, not
as the taken-for-granted horizons in which we must understand the new,
but as partial limits that the new activity may enable us cautiously to modify
and venture beyond.10
While this intermediate tradition has learned from and adapted Hegels
historical approach and taken his advice to remain as close as possible to
contemporary experience (abjuring the temptation to jump over Rhodes), it
nevertheless rotates his orientation 180 degrees around the fixed axis of our
real need. Rather than comprehending and reconciling the new and problematic activity from the twilight of the old, this approach uses the dawning
9
10
Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, in The Essential Works, Vol. I, p. 305.

Although I draw on the later work of Foucault in the following paragraph to characterise this
historical approach of reciprocal elucidation, it is shared in different ways by Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 122, 1303; Charles Taylor,
Comparison, History, Truth in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995); William E. Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999); and Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism. This school of political philosophy
is examined in David Owen, Orientation and Enlightenment: An Essay on Critique and Genealogy,
in Foucault Contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue Between Genealogy and Critical Theory, eds.
Samantha Ashenden and David Owen (London: Sage, 1999); and in Volume I, Chapter 3.
46
light of the novel activity to free us from the sedimented conventions of the
old (se dprendre de soi-mme), to some limited and relative extent (garement),
in order to think differently (penser autrement).11 By this form of philosophical
investigation (askesis), one is able to test in what is given to us as universal,
necessary, obligatory (the dominant institutions and their traditions) what
place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent and the product of
arbitrary constraints and to what extent it is possible to go beyond them (de
leur franchissement possible): to grasp the points where change is possible and
desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take.12
Such an approach is difficult, precarious and uncertain. It has neither the
security and comfort of reaffirming and legitimating our most familiar and
mature institutions and traditions of political thought nor the excitement
and media fame of hurling bold conjectures at the world at large. Any
reciprocal elucidation is relative, contextual, partial and defeasible, and,
therefore, open to continual reworking a sketch in Wittgensteins sense
rather than a theory. We are thus always in the position of beginning again.
Yet, in compensation, it is the orientation that has some chance of rendering
aspects of the present world to which we belong a little less unclear, enabling
us to find ourselves within it and perhaps even to go on. While Hegel is
right to say that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of
dusk, Bill Reid, the great Haida artist, reminds us that the raven of Haida
Gwaii the universal Indigenous symbol of our ability to modify our ways
of being human relative to our past and become other than we are takes
flight at dawn; indeed brings the dawn into being and so sets the scene.13 In
sum, then, the defining temperament of this Enlightenment orientation,
suspended between the owls respect for and deep attachment to what our
great teachers and predecessors have achieved and the ravens curiosity and
always unsatisfied longing for what lies on our horizons, is perhaps
expressed well by Nietzsche in the last paragraph of Daybreak, written in
Genoa in 18801:
All those brave birds which fly out into the distance, into the farthest distance it is
certain! somewhere or other they will be unable to go on and will perch on a mast or
a bare cliff face and they will even be thankful for this miserable accommodation!
But who would venture to infer from that, that there was not an immense open
11
12
13
Michel Foucault, Modifications, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 313. For the importance of this short text,
see Arpad Szakolczai, Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works (London: Routledge, 1998),
pp. 5360.
Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, in The Essential Works, Vol. I, pp. 31516, 319.
Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst, The Raven Steals the Light (Vancouver: Douglas and MacIntyre,
1988).
47
space before them, that they had flown as far as one could fly! All our great teachers
and predecessors have at last come to a stop and it is not with the noblest or most
graceful of gestures that weariness comes to a stop: it will be the same with you and
me! But what does that matter to you and me! Other birds will fly farther!
Whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us
than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, thither where all the suns of
humanity have hitherto gone down? 14
This approach can be applied to some aspects of the puzzling forms of

political activity that have emerged in a variety of sites in the context of
contemporary globalisation. Section 1 distinguishes two kinds of practices
of government and democracy (and two corresponding uses of the terms
government and democracy) woven historically into our ways of ruling
and being ruled (thus not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God
knows where). One, the restrictive sense of government and democracy, refers to the mature and predominant practices of government and
democracy typical of representative democratic nation-states, their institutions and the traditions of understanding in which they are described,
operated and evaluated. The other, the non-restrictive sense of government and democracy, refers to the less prominent practices of government
and democracy that do not conform to the typical practices of representative
government and democracy and so cannot be understood adequately in
terms of theories and traditions of representative government. Yet, by
reciprocal elucidation, these non-restrictive practices have the capacity to
illuminate a range of political activity in contemporary globalisation. I will
refer to the former as, interchangeably, restrictive or representative and to
the latter as non-restrictive or extensive practices of government and
democracy, and to the class of both types as simply practices of government
and democracy.
Section 2 summarises how the practices of representative government
and democracy came to predominate and appear universal, necessary and
obligatory, but now occlude understanding of anomalous forms of government and democracy, doing fatal injury to the principles underlying them.
Section 3 sets out a number of dimensions of contemporary political globalisation that have rendered the present problematic and given rise to critical
reflection. Section 4 surveys the extent to which these changes can be
understood in terms of the owlish language of representative government
and democracy, in its unmodified and modified forms. Section 5 suggests
14
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1982), 575, p. 228.
48
how other aspects of global politics can be defeasibly characterised and

analysed only in comparison to extensive practices of government and
democracy.
1 two types of practices of government
and democracy: restrictive and extensive
The forms and the specific situations of the government of men [and women] by
one another in any given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross,
impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce
one another. It is certain that in contemporary societies the state is not simply one
of the forms or specific situations of the exercise of power even if it is the most
important but that in a certain way all other forms of power relation must refer to
it. But this is not because they are derived from it; it is rather because power
relations have come more and more under state control (although this state control
has not taken the same form in pedagogical, judicial, economic, or family systems
[of governance]). In referring here to the restricted sense of the word government,
one could say that power relations have been progressively governmentalized, that
is to say, elaborated, rationalized and centralized in the form of, or under the
auspices of, state institutions.15
In this quotation from a short, synoptic text written four years before his
death (1980), Foucault looks back over twenty-five years of studying the
history of practices of government in which Europeans have constituted
themselves as subjects engaged in coordinated interaction and summarises
two major findings of his research. Firstly, the forms and the specific
situations of the government of men [and women] by one another in any
given society are multiple: that is, the practices of government and the
forms of subjects of each practice come in a multiplicity of forms. The
ways in which men and women are governed, govern themselves, and
respond to and modify forms of governance in families, schools, churches,
militaries, corporations, markets, bureaucracies, unions, voluntary organisations, municipalities, Indigenous nations, provinces, states, federations,
international regimes and organisations, the United Nations, and global
systems criss-cross and overlap in complicated but nonetheless analysable
ways. Secondly, while the multiple practices of government have proliferated since the Reformation from the consolidation of absolutist states in
the early modern period to the formation of representative democratic
nation-states in the modern period they have tended to be elaborated,
rationalised and centralised, either directly in the form of, or indirectly
15
Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. 224.
49
under the control of, the institutions characteristic of representative nationstates. The process of progressive governmentalisation, then, is the historical
process by which the restrictive practices of government representative
government have come to maturity and predominance, tending to bring
most forms of government under their auspices in practice and also in
theory (what might be called the owl of Minerva effect).
Using David Helds classification of historical forms of globalisation into
early modern (14th18th century), modern (19th20th century) and contemporary (194521st century), my thesis is that one feature of contemporary
political globalisation is a new trend towards the dispersion of practices of
government and democracy.16 It has two major aspects. The first and more
familiar is the dispersion of standard practices of representative government so
they are no longer centralised in nation-states and a Westphalian system of
sovereign nation-states. It is this aspect Held refers to when he speaks of
political globalisation, multilayered governance and the diffusion of political
authority and cosmopolitan democracy.17 Moreover, the dispersion of
political authority in these ways does not displace the long-term trend of
governmentalisation across all three periods but coexists with it. It can be
seen as a modification of governmentalisation in the restrictive sense, since
many of the characteristics of representative government remain, while
others, such as centralisation, sovereignty and uniformity, are amended
and qualified by the dispersion. For example, the global human rights
regime qualifies rather than displaces the regime of sovereign nation-states
and is itself a development out of the juridical practices of representative
nation-states. The modification of sovereignty in the contemporary period
has also enabled us to see that the actual history of representative governments has been much less centralised and uniform than the prevailing
political theories presume.18 Accordingly, this aspect of dispersion can be
understood by modifying the mature and dominant traditions of representative government from within, as long as one takes a critical (raven-like)
rather than regulative (owl-like) attitude to some characteristics of these
16
17
18
David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, eds., Global Transformations:
Politics, Economics and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 7881. Although I have serious
objections, I am nonetheless indebted to the scholarly work of David Held and his fellow researchers on
historical forms of globalisation and the trends towards cosmopolitan democracy.
Held et al., Global Transformations, pp. 3286. For cosmopolitan democracy, see Held, Democracy
and the Global Order and Daniele Archibugi, David Held and Martin Khler, eds., Re-imagining
Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
See Michael Keating, So Many Nations, So Few States, in Multinational Democracies, eds. Alain-G.
Gagnon and James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
50
traditions while holding the others firm. Call this the modified owlish or
Hegelian aspect of contemporary political globalisation (section 4).
The second aspect of this trend is the dispersion of extensive practices of
government within and across representative nation-states. This is not a
separate trend, but one that criss-crosses with the former, often forming two
aspects of the same institutions: to recollect, they are superimposed, they
cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. Moreover, this global process of non-restrictive
governmentalisation also can be seen as a modification of an early-modern
and modern set of processes: namely, the persistence and proliferation of
non-representative practices of government since the Reformation and the
Dutch army reforms. Recall that the contribution to the understanding of
modernity offered by Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger,
Dreyfus, Bourdieu, Giddens, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Connolly and Taylor
has been to draw our attention to a multiplicity of practices of government
which shape our identities and modes of interaction in ways that cannot be
understood in the predominant traditions of political thought because they
are different from and obscured by the more prominent practices of
representative government (or by the more prominent features of these
practices).19 Accordingly, the second aspect of contemporary political globalisation can be elucidated by comparison with this body of work, and by
contrast with the great theories of representative governments and their
prominent institutions. Call this the modified raven aspect of contemporary
political globalisation (section 5).
Most of the dispersed practices of government are not democratic. Many
are bureaucratic, authoritarian or systemic. They coordinate the interaction of
the participants predominantly behind their backs, without their say,
through the market, bureaucracy or the functional intermeshing of the
unintended consequences of their actions. They are on the face of it systems
rather than practices in so far as the participants are more patients or
subjects than agents or citizens.20 Furthermore, despite the evidence
for an uneven and forward-and-backward trend to democratisation (formal representative democracy), the spread of institutions of representative
democracy to many decolonising peoples after 1960 and 1989, the development of supranational regimes such as the North American Free Trade
19
20
For an introduction to these philosophers of practices, see Theodore R. Schatzki, Social Practices: A
Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996).
For Habermas useful distinction between a practice and a system, or, rather, the practical and
systemic aspects of an organised form of human cooperation, see Schatzki, Social Practices, pp. 8990.
51
Agreement (NAFTA) and the EU, the increase in power of transnational

corporations, the weakening of representative governments and social democratic practices under neo-liberalism, and the underfunding and bypassing
of the democratic institutions of the United Nations have been accompanied by the distribution of decision-making and implementation powers to
non-democratic local, regional and global institutions, indirect infrastructural rule, and an emergent system of nodes in a global network, for what
appears to be a net global democratic deficit.21
Nevertheless, the dispersion of practices of government has been met by
popular struggles that seek to alter them. The second half of my thesis is
that these struggles are of two types, corresponding to the two types of
practices of government. The first type are struggles of and for democracy in
the restrictive, representative sense: to make non-representative practices of
government democratic in the representative sense (or make practices of
representative government more representative), or to bring them under the
control of dispersed representative-democratic government institutions
(local, regional, national, global and the UN) in traditional ways. The
second type are struggles of and for democracy in the extensive sense: to
bring extensive practices of government under some new form of democratic control by the participants or to link them up in novel ways with
representative institutions. These struggles are democratic in the extensive
sense just in so far as the participants in any practice of government strive
to be heard and to negotiate to some extent the relations of power that
govern their conduct. The forms of this second type of democratic struggle
in non-representative practices are closely related to the specific and diverse
character of the practices of government in which the contests occur and so
do not conform to the dominant models of representative-democratic
activity.
To illustrate with an example taken up in section 5, citizens struggle to
bring global forest companies under the democratic control of representatives in provincial and federal parliaments, the democratic institutions of
their customers in Europe, Asia and the UN. At the same time, local and
global concerned citizens and NGOs confront these multinationals on
21
David Potter, David Goldblatt, Margaret Kiloh, and Paul Lewis, eds., Democratization (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1997). For a brief summary, see Held et al., Global Transformations, pp. 469, and 3945
for the shift from direct imperial to indirect infrastructural rule in the twentieth century. For the
metaphor of nodes [of mostly non-democratic power and authority] in a global network, rather than
representative nation-states in an international system, see Manuel Castells, The Information Age:
Economy, Society and Culture, 3 Vols., especially Vol. III, End of Millennium (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
1998), pp. 33560. For Castells, see Chapter 6, this volume.
52
specific logging sites: to negotiate face to face, to challenge their immediate

forest practices, hiring practices and ecological claims, the way gender is
governed in their company, their responsibility to local and the global
communities, to value-added industries, their stance towards Indigenous
peoples, their shareholders and the like. This also illustrates the point that
these two distinct types of democratic activity are not separate but often
occur in the same nexus of dispersed practices of government.
These two types of democratic struggle are internally related to the
multiplication and dispersion of practices of government definitive of
contemporary political globalisation. The struggles over how employees
are governed in dispersed practices, how they relate to the environment
broadly defined, and their effects on local and global communities are
internal to the logic of the organisation and dispersion of these practices
of government. They cannot be understood or analysed without taking into
account the agonism between the attempts to govern the participants in a
specific way and the responses to that mode of governance. Just as the
development of capitalism and representative democracy are not autonomous historical processes but involve and are shaped by the extensive
struggles of workers and consumers over the practices of production and
the restrictive struggles of citizens and representatives over the practices of
government, so too contemporary political globalisation is not composed of
processes in which humans are powerless. The processes are partly constituted by the two types of democratic contestation. Therefore, the dispersion of practices of government and the democratic struggles over them
have to be understood together. Foucault summarises the general methodological point in the following way:
This leads to the study of what could be called practical systems [practices of
government and struggles of democratic freedom]. Here we are taking as a
homogeneous domain of reference what they [participants] do and how they
do it. That is, the forms of rationality that organize their ways of doing things (this
might be called the technological aspect) and the freedom with which they act
within these practical systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the rules of
the game, up to a certain point (this might be called the strategic side of these
practices).22
These two types of struggle also can be seen as modifications of earlymodern and modern forms of struggle. The first is a continuation of
struggles for representative democracy, suitably modified to fit the dispersed
character of practices of government in political globalisation. They are
22
53
struggles for democratisation as it is standardly defined in the literature.

These in turn can be understood in the suitably modified owlish terms of
comparison with the dominant theories of representative democracy over
the last two hundred years, as Held has shown.23 The second is a continuation and modification of the more specific contests for democratic control
in extensive practices of government since the early-modern period. These
struggles are heterogeneous because they are tailored to the specifics of the
practice they challenge and seek to modify. Light can be shed on the
dawning, non-representative democratic activities involved in contemporary globalisation by means of raven-inspired analogies and disanalogies
with accounts of modern, non-representative democratic struggles.24
Although this two-path approach to political globalisation from the
perspectives of both the owl and the raven may seem obvious, Hegels
Preface forewarns us that it is seldom followed. Firstly, processes of globalisation are often analysed systemically, as if they unfold independently of
contingent human action. Secondly, even when the exercise of democratic
freedom vis--vis dispersed practices of government is taken into account, it
tends to be construed in the categories of representative democracy and its
traditions of interpretation, or as movements that are on their way to
becoming familiar forms of representative democratic politics (parties,
interest groups, labour organisations, struggles for rights and so on). This
modified Hegelian mode of understanding is accurate for one aspect of
contemporary political globalisation, but it has a tendency to overreach its
limits and claim to comprehend both aspects of political globalisation, thus
doing fatal injury to the other. When the limitation is noticed, the auspices
of restrictive governmentalisation remain so hegemonic that the response is
either to ignore what the dominant representative theories fail to explain or
to treat the extensive practices of government and democracy as not really
democratic at all, and to dismiss their traditions of interpretation as illegitimate or incoherent (as the response to Foucaults research amply illustrates), as if there could be nothing new under the sun. To see how this
limited understanding of our present has come to be definitive of political
23
24
Helds work on cosmopolitan democracy is the best example of this extension and modification of
traditional representative democratic theory to understand and evaluate the first type of democratic
struggles and the way in which they may be shaping dispersed practices of representative government.
For a complementary analysis, see Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community:
Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
Characteristics of non-representative democratic struggles are discussed by Foucault in The Subject
and Power, in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, pp. 21112 and Foucault, What is Critique?,
in What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers to Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James
Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
54
reason itself as if this resting place is as far as we could fly we need to

review how the concepts and practices of government and democracy have
come to be restricted to representative government and democracy.
2 practices of representative government
and democracy
The prevailing practices of representative government and democracy in
capitalist societies developed in the early-modern and modern periods. They
include some combination of the following types of institution: institutions
of formal legislators or representatives elected by citizens in a multi-party
competition, the rule of law and public procedures, a system of administrative bureaucracies to execute the laws uniformly, a judicial system to
interpret, review and apply them, a distinction between public and private,
a public sphere of free speech, assembly and dissent, a military accountable
to the representative institutions, and a constitution that lays down the
division of powers among institutions and federal units and the political,
civil and social rights and duties of citizens and groups.25
Representative government and democracy in turn is seen as the system
of government appropriate to, and the most legitimate form of, a modern
nation-state. The process of governmentalisation in the restrictive sense
refers to the gradual colonisation of early-modern absolutist states by the
practices of representative government and democracy. The modern
nation-state is defined in terms of a national democratic community of
citizens and a geographical and bounded territory. The community of
citizens has the capacity to elect and hold accountable their representatives,
and the representatives have the capacity to make law and policy to govern
their constituents major affairs within their geographically bounded territory. Each nation-state is in turn sovereign. The political world consists of a
system of sovereign representative nation-states, the Westphalian system,
named after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 even though several of its
features did not come into widespread practice until the modern period.26
Prior to the eighteenth century, democracy was used extensively as a
term of abuse to refer to the people assembling together and demanding a
direct voice in the specific manner in which they were governed in any
25
26
See David Held, Models of Democracy, 3rd edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).
Held et al., Global Transformations, pp. 359, 7880. The development of the system of sovereign
states and representative governments is treated in more historical detail in Held, Democracy and the
Global Order.
55
practice of government. Athenian democracy and early-modern local revolts

stood as exemplars of this disruptive form of popular activity. Most of the
canonical political theorists of the early-modern period, as Bernard Manin
reminds us, saw representative government as directly opposed to democracy.
They condemned democracy as popular, contentious, headless, licentious
and ill-suited to large modern states. By the early nineteenth century, the
struggles between defenders of democracy and representative government
were over and democracy as a term of approval came to be routinely
predicated on representative government as the modern form of government
appropriate to large commercial societies, thereby covering over the earlier
struggles.27
Democracy, as Kant puts it in his distinctive manner of presenting his
side of an argument as the universal and necessary truth, in the proper sense
of the term, is necessarily a despotism, and every form of government that is
not representative is properly speaking without form.28 The restriction of
democracy to representative democracy and representative democracy as
the only legitimate form of government is perhaps best codified by Thomas
Paine. In his influential Rights of Man, he states: Simple democracy was
society governing itself without the aid of secondary means. By ingrafting
representation upon democracy, we arrive at a system of government
capable of embracing and confederating all the various interests and every
extent of territory and population.29 With Benjamin Constants famous
speech of 1819, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the
Moderns, the semantic restriction was completed. Representative democracy is not only presented as the sole legitimate form of government
appropriate to the sociological conditions of large capitalist states, but any
unsatisfied longing for other extensive forms of democracy is depicted as
romantic nostalgia for Athenian democracy or utopian speculation and is
said to lead in practice to the Terror.30
A complementary restriction of the term government occurred during
the processes of governmentalisation of the early-modern and modern
periods. In the sixteenth century, government was widely used to characterise any relation of power and authority in which the conduct or action of
27
28
29
30
Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1997).
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, pp. 11314.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Gregory Claeys (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
1992), p. 142. Compare Held, Democracy and the Global Order, p. 119.
Benjamin Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns, in Political
Writings.
56
a person or group was guided by the conduct or action of another, whether

this involved the practice of caring for children, educating pupils, mastering
servants and apprentices, governing wives, caring for souls or the poor, or
governing subjects and representatives in parochial, royal, county, regional
and national practices of government. That is, government in the extensive
sense refers to any form of guiding the conduct of others and the range of
possible actions the others may take up in response:
Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries [the strategic model]
or the linking of one to the other [the contractual model] than a question of
government. This word must be allowed the very broad meaning which it had in
the sixteenth century. Government did not refer only to political structures or to
the management of states; rather it designated the way in which the conduct of
individuals or of groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of
communities, of families, of the sick. It did not only cover the legitimately
constituted forms of political or economic subjection, but also modes of action
more or less considered and calculated, which were destined to act upon the
possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the
possible field of action of others.31
Consequently, a central concern of political writers was to sort out the

various practices of government; not to confuse them or to purposely
collapse them into one canonical form, as Locke typically reminds his
readers in 1689:
That the power of a Magistrate over a Subject, may be distinguished from that of a
Father over his Children, a Master over his Servant, a Husband over his Wife, and a
Lord over his Slave. All which distinct Powers happening sometimes altogether in
the same Man, if he be considered under these different Relations, it may help us to
distinguish these Powers from one another, and shew the difference betwixt a Ruler
of a Commonwealth, a Father of a Family, and a Captain of a Galley.32
Although the equipment employed in practices of government, the

purposes for which human activity is coordinated in diverse associations,
and the modes of comportment or identities the governed and governors
bear in the multiplicity of overlapping games of government are various, as
Locke illustrates, what they have in common is that the conduct of the
governed is not determined but free. As Foucault puts it, by this we mean
individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in
which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments
31
32
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970), 2, p. 286.
57
may be realized.33 The range of possible action, between domination at

one extreme (where movement is determined) and direct confrontation
between adversaries at the other (where a relation of governance gives way to
a relation of revolt), is what Foucault referred to earlier as the strategic
freedom with which participants act within any practice of government.
This freedom is democracy in the extensive sense: the exercise of the
abilities of the governed to negotiate the way their conduct is guided.
Throughout the modern period, government gradually came to be
restricted to the formal institutions of representative government in the
so-called public sector, and the broader use of government fell into disuse.
The modern disciplines of political science and political philosophy, with
their restrictive focus on the public institutions of representative government
and democracy, augmented this trend. Moreover, as Weber and Foucault
have shown, the range of democratic free play in the multiplicity of practices
of government came to be restricted as forms of control and reflexive
monitoring of thought and behaviour were introduced to train, coordinate
and predict activity in detail.34 These techniques of control changed the
character of practices of government, as Hubert Dreyfus explains:
Once machine tools took over the dominant Western style changed from
governing to controlling. No one governs a car. People control their cars, or they
are in trouble. People control electric saws, power plants, chemical reactions, and so
on. Rather than govern their sexual desires, people now control birth and the
transmission of disease. Controlling manifests a different stance towards things and
people and amounts to a different way of seeing them. It is a different style. We can
see this in the difference between managers who try to govern their employees by
having them join in the process of determining how goals will be met, and those who
try to control them by simply setting work schedules and output requirements.35
Practices of control became integrated into larger systems of markets and

bureaucracies. For reasons of efficiency and time constraints, attempts to
negotiate their organisation were seen to be inappropriate, both in the form
of unsuccessful large-scale planning in socialist countries and in the more
moderate form of social democracy and welfare liberalism, at least among
neo-liberals. Finally, when moderns challenged the ways their conduct
is regulated in extensive practices, they too expressed their demands in
the language of control, speaking of participants self-management and
33
34
35
The classic studies are Foucault, Discipline and Punish and Taylor, Sources of the Self, especially
pp. 15976.
Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Spinosa and Fernando Flores, Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship,
Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 26.
58
self-control more than self-government and democracy. To paraphrase

Hegel, with this final semantic shift the process of formation of government
and democracy exclusively as representative government and democracy has
been completed.
The singular and contingent historical assemblage of modern representative government and democracy is the political world painted by the owl
of Minerva in grey as universal and necessary, from the Philosophy of Right to
the latest modern political theory. It is now being challenged and modified
in the course of contemporary political globalisation in two distinct ways.
3 contemporary political globalisation
and global governance
Following Held, globalisation can be thought of as:
a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial
organization of social relations and transactions assessed in terms of their
extensity, intensity, velocity and impact generating transcontinental or inter
regional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power
[F]lows refer to the movement of physical artefacts, people, symbols, tokens and
information across space and time, while networks refer to regularized or patterned
interactions between independent agents, nodes of activity, or sites of power.36
This means, firstly, that globalisation is a cluster of uneven, hierarchical

and unpredictable processes of interregional networks and systems of interaction and exchange, not a singular condition or a process of global
integration. Secondly, global interconnectedness weaves networks of relations between communities, states, international institutions, NGOs and
multinational corporations. The networks form processes of structuration
the product of both individual and group actions and the cumulative
interactions among agencies and institutions. Globalisation, thirdly, occurs
across all domains of social life. Fourthly, global processes deterritorialise
and reterritorialise socioeconomic and political space so it is no longer
co-terminus with established legal and territorial boundaries. The twentieth
century has experienced a shift from the direct, territorial forms of control
characteristic of the long age of European and American imperialism to new
forms of non-territorial imperialism based on control of peoples and markets by indirect, infrastructural control. Finally, the organisation and reach
of power is expanded so the concentrated sites and exercise of power are
36
Held et al., Global Transformations, p. 16.
59
increasingly at a distance from the subjects and locales that experience the
consequences. The major domains of social life enmeshed in contemporary
globalisation are politics, organised violence, global trade and markets,
global finance, corporations and global production networks, the movement of peoples, cultures and nations, and the environment.37
Contemporary globalisation is altering modern representative politics by
the globalisation of politics, or, as Held terms it, global politics. These are
forms of politics that do not fit neatly into the modern categories of either
national or international politics:
Global politics is a term which usefully captures the stretching of political relations
across space and time; the extension of political power and political activity across
the boundaries of the modern nation state. Political decisions and actions in one
part of the world can rapidly acquire worldwide ramifications [S]ites of political
action and/or decision making can become linked through rapid communications
into complex networks of decision making and interaction. [Furthermore] action
at a distance permeates with greater intensity the social conditions and cognitive
worlds of specific places or policy communities [D]evelopments at the global
level frequently acquire almost instantaneous local consequences and vice versa.38
Global politics disaggregates the central feature of modern representative

government: that the national representative government governs the affairs
of a territorially bounded community of fate and that community holds its
representatives accountable for the power exercised over them. Peoples are
dispersed in overlapping communities of fate, and political power is shared,
dispersed, overlapping, contested and battered by a range of forces and
agencies.
Global politics has given rise to global governance. Global governance is
not the institutions of modern representative governments or of the international system of nation-states but is, nonetheless, a modification and
expansion of them to govern global politics. The UN, the World Trade
Organization (WTO), NGOs, the political power of multinational corporations, social movements, local, regional, federal and supranational governments, international regimes, the global human rights regime, and global
legal regimes are well-known examples. They embody the shift from
37
38
Ibid., pp. 278, 4301. A chapter is devoted to each of the domains of globalisation. I have also drawn
on the work of Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalisation and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy
of Development (London: Macmillan, 1997) and Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From
Western Origins to Global Faith (London: Zed, 1997).
Held et al., Global Transformations, pp. 4950. Helds analysis draws on the groundbreaking work of
R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge
60
territorially based politics of the modern era to the emerging era of global
politics and multilayered global and regional governance.39 In several
respects, global politics and global governance can be compared to the
messy overlapping of practices of government in the late medieval period
prior to the early-modern consolidation of centralised European states.
4 unmodified and modified representative
practices of government and democracy
I will now sketch how the problematisation of the present by global politics
can be understood from the perspective of the two approaches laid out in
sections 1 and 2: unmodified and modified representative government and
democracy, and unmodified and modified extensive government and
democracy. Evidently, as Held stresses, modern representative government
and democracy persist into the contemporary era despite their decentring by
global politics and the uneven emergence of multilayered global governance.
The clichs of the end of sovereignty and the impotence of representative
national government in an era of globalisation, fashionable among many
neo-liberals and post-moderns, underestimate the resilience of practices of
modern politics.40
For example, it is true that countries such as Canada lost considerable
control over macro-economic policy because they became publicly indebted
to and dependent on global capital during the period of welfare liberalism.
Nonetheless, the irony of neo-liberal deficit and debt reduction is that North
Atlantic countries are now less dependent on global capital and thus more
able to exercise the democratic powers over economic policy that neoliberals and hyper-globalisers claim they no longer hold. There is little in
global economic processes that now impede, say, job creation policies. Only
traditional constraints on representative will-formation impede such policies, and the rise of social-democratic governments in Europe has shown
that these can be overcome.41
Similarly, processes of globalisation in the various domains affect different regions, sectors and peoples differently. The increased ability of capital
39
40
41
Held et al., Global Transformations, pp. 4977, 801, 4424. See also the Report of the Commission
on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Held,
Democracy and Globalization; and James Rosenau, Governance and Democracy in a Globalizing
World, in Re-imagining Political Community.
For these examples, see Will Kymlicka, Citizenship in an Era of Globalization: Commentary on
Held, in Democracys Edges, eds. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon (Cambridge: Cambridge
61
to exit in response to economic policy, for example, only holds for certain
areas of the economy. It is difficult to see how services, agriculture, education, fisheries, tourism, healthcare, retirement industries and the like can
move. However, these uneven processes do not determine public policy.
They are, or can be, mediated through representative democratic discussion
and debate, and this explains many of the differences in policy across
OECD countries. Even the uncontrolled flow of global financial capital
could be governed by traditional coordination of nation-states to implement a Tobin tax.
Moreover, as Castells in particular underscores, cultural and migratory
processes of globalisation involve the multiplication of identities and loyalties, and these engender demands for policies of multiculturalism and
multinationalism throughout the multilayered governments in response. It
appears that our [contemporary] societies are constituted by the interaction
between the net and the self, between the network society and the
power of identity.42 Nevertheless, the globalisation of individual and
collective identities has not diminished loyalty to the (multicultural and
multinational) representative nation-state except in the cases of outright
secession (which are also cases of unmodified modern politics). In Canada,
80 per cent of Quebecers continue to value and care about their Canadian
identity alongside their Quebec identity. The proliferation of supranational
political associations such as the EU and NAFTA Agreement have not
generated supranational political communities of fate that replace or even
seriously challenge the traditional national communities within. In most
cases, citizens see whatever representation they have in these larger associations as the representation of their national community. Canadians do not
see themselves as part of a larger North American community of fate but,
rather, as members of the federal community of Canada which in turn is in
this larger non-communal association.43
The widespread dissatisfaction with and cynicism towards the potency of
representative government does not seem to be the effect of globalisation.
Rather, it appears to be caused by the traditional faults in the practices of
modern representative government themselves. The high cost of running
for office; the failure to represent women adequately and to represent the
growing cultural diversity of the electorate; the inequities of the first past
the post system of elections; the lack of proportional representation and the
representation of territorial (riding) identity to the exclusion of all other
42
43
Castells, End of Millennium, p. 352.

For Canadian and European examples, see Gagnon and Tully, eds., Multinational Democracies.
62
identities; the impotence of backbenchers and parliamentary committees as

decision-making power becomes concentrated in tiny elites; the abuse of
party discipline and orders in council; and the absence of open democratic
deliberation in parliaments are faults that have been well documented by
countless studies and royal commissions. Such faults render representative
government unresponsive to democratic will-formation and so open to
manipulation by the elites who serve to gain by disempowering representative institutions under the rhetoric of globalisation as a process that does not
allow for democratic negotiation. Whether modern representative governments remain effective and retain the allegiance of their citizens will depend
more on the successes of traditional reform movements in correcting these
imperfections than on contemporary globalisation.
If we turn to the institutions of global governance that are emerging in
response to global politics, many of them can be seen either as modified
versions of the practices of modern representative government (such as global
human and environmental rights, the EU and the proposed peoples chamber
of the UN) or as non-democratic concentrations of power that are sites of
struggle for democratisation in the representative sense (such as multinational
corporations and NGOs). These are instances of the aspect of contemporary
political globalisation described in section 1 as the dispersion of standard
practices of representative government so they are no longer centralised in
nation-states and a Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states. Helds
global project of cosmopolitan democracy is perhaps the best-known and
most promising example of this modified owlish orientation towards contemporary political globalisation. In addition, he mentions two other approaches
that are extensions and modifications of the traditions of interpretation of
modern politics, liberal internationalism and radical republicanism.44
The projection of three traditions of modern political thought onto
global politics and governance discloses aspects of them and the struggles
to democratise them. Nevertheless, it is important not to treat them as if
they constitute a comprehensive way of understanding global politics, for this
would be to misunderstand and do fatal injury to other forms of global
governance and democratic activity. There are two distinct types of limitation
of these three schools of modern political thought. The first limitation is that
they do not modify their own traditions enough in reflecting on global
representative politics. They tend to project contingent features of modern
representative government and democracy onto contemporary global politics and so misunderstand what is new in global practices of representative
44
63
government. Recall that two equal principles underlie all the mature practices
of modern representative government and democracy and give them their
legitimacy: representative popular sovereignty and the rule of law. The
tension distinctive of modern politics is the permanent difficulty of preserving
the equality of these two principles: of ensuring that the people rule themselves through their representatives and so subject themselves to laws of their
own authorship, and, at the same time, that these practices of representative
democracy are carried out in accord with the rule of law.45 As a result, there is
always a reciprocal, back-and-forth movement between a provisional rule of
law and a continuous process of its democratic discussion and reform.
Cosmopolitan democracy does not treat both principles equally, but gives
priority to the rule of law. It attempts to specify the principles and the
institutional arrangements for making accountable those sites and forms of
power which presently operate beyond the scope of democratic control.46
Cosmopolitan theorists work out, by a process of solitary reflection on the
European history of representative government and democracy, and then
project globally, prior to any exercise of representative popular sovereignty in
forums of democratic dialogue, a cosmopolitan public law that lays down the
preconditions of global practices of democracy. This overrides the equality of
the principle of representative popular sovereignty, which requires that any
cosmopolitan public law needs to be democratically discussed and agreed to
by those subject to it, or their representatives, if it is to be legitimate.47
If the two principles are treated equally, then the extension of the rule of
law and representative democracy to global politics will necessarily involve
democratic discussion of the forms that the rule of law and democracy
should take in the multiplicity of practices of governance, not once and
for all, but over all time. In virtue of cultural diversity, a host of contextual
factors, and the overlapping of communities, governments and identities,
the legitimate processes of contemporary global constitutionalism
and democratisation are not predictable and cannot be specified or
45
46
47
These two equal principles are articulated and discussed by Jrgen Habermas, On the Internal
Relation between the Rule of Law and Democracy, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political
Theory, eds. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greif (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), and Rawls,
Reply to Habermas. They are accepted by Held, Democracy and the Global Order, p. 147.
Held, Democracy and the Global Order, pp. 190201. The justification for the unilateral imposition of
a cosmopolitan public law is that its rights and duties are the preconditions of the exercise of popular
sovereignty, of democratic deliberation. But, for a law to be a legitimate precondition of modern
politics it must itself be subject to democratic deliberation, or else the principle of popular sovereignty
is not given equal weight.
Held, Democracy and the Global Order, pp. 159218. Liberal internationalism and radical republicanism
also project specific features of their traditions of representative government onto global governance.
64
comprehended beforehand. There is always a range of possible free actions

available to the participants. Thus, even in the attempts to understand
political globalisation in the modified terms of representative government
and democracy, only the underlying principles, and not the more specific
institutional forms these principles have taken in the early-modern and
modern periods in the West, should be projected onto global politics if
what is really going on is to be understood.48
The second limitation of the modified owlish approach is that it does not
help us to understand what was described in section 1 as the second aspect of
contemporary political globalisation: the dispersion of extensive practices of
government within and across representative nation-states. This is the
subject of the following section.
5 unmodified and modified extensive practices
of government and democracy
Gathering together the features introduced in sections 1 and 2, any coordinated form of human interaction is a practice of government because it
involves reciprocal, multiple and overlapping relations of power and authority in which the actions of some agents guide the actions of others. A
relation of governance does not act directly on the agents, unmediated by
their own thought and action, as does a relation of force or violence, but on
their action. As a consequence, those over whom power is exercised are
recognised and guided to the very end as agents who are free: that is, for
whom a whole field of possible actions is available in the course of being
guided. At the two limits of this field of freedom in relations of governance
are sedimented structures of domination, in which freedom is reduced to a
minimum by force or habituation (as in a prison system), and the background possibility of confronting the relation of governance as a whole and
seeking to overthrow it (as in a revolution). No one in a practice of
government stands outside relations of governance: the mode of conduct
by which one agent guides another is itself the product of being guided by
others. For example, the professors who guide pupils in the practice of
education are themselves professors on account of being educated by others;
by the ways in which they acted freely in that relationship; by their interaction
48
I have discussed this approach to contemporary constitutionalism and democratisation in Strange

Multiplicity. For a brilliant analysis of European Union constitutionalism along similar lines, see Jo
Shaw, Postnational Constitutionalism in the European Union, Journal of European Public Policy 6
(4), 1999: 57997.
65
with the freedom of their pupils; and so on across the many relational
identities the participants bear.
Any practice of government, then, involves three complex elements:
techniques of government, strategies of freedom and modes of conduct.
Government in the extensive sense refers primarily to the first or technological side. It comprises, Mitchell Dean enumerates,
any more or less calculated and rational activity, undertaken by a multiplicity of
authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of know
ledge, that seeks to shape conduct by working through our desires, aspirations,
interests and beliefs, for definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively
unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes. An analysis of government,
then, is concerned with the means of calculation, both qualitative and quantitative,
the type of governing authority or agency, the forms of knowledge, techniques and
other means employed, the entity to be governed and how it is conceived, the ends
sought and the outcomes and consequences.49
The second element, strategies of freedom or democracy in the extensive

sense, refers to the ways in which the participants question, negotiate and
modify en passant the specific techniques of government: that is, the forms
of knowledge, systems of communication, organisation of roles and tasks,
and modes of production, distribution and consumption of goods and
services and their effects. The third element, modes of conduct, comprises
the coordinated interaction that results from the interplay of the first two
elements: what the participants do and the way they do it.50
Modern theorists of extensive practices have exposed and examined
whole areas of government and democratic freedom in modern societies
that the dominant traditions have bypassed. These practices of government
and democracy take place outside the public boundaries of representative
government and democracy, either in the private realm or beneath the
features of representative practices that standardly figure in modern political
theories. Marxs specific analysis of struggles over the length and organisation of the working day in nineteenth-century British factories is a classic
example of the former.51 This type of struggle commonly has been understood in two generalised ways in the modern period. Either they are struggles
for socialism (direct confrontations over the relations of production by means
of revolution) or struggles for social democracy (labour-management
49
50
51
Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), p. 11. Dean
provides an excellent analysis of the governmentality approach.
The analysis of practices in terms of these three complex elements and its critics is discussed in
Volume I, Chapter 3.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (New York: Vintage, 1977), Chapter 10.
66
negotiations over unionisation, the conditions of work, and entrenchment

of social and economic rights by means of strikes and the formation of
social-democratic parties). The social-democratic understanding of such
struggles has become predominant, especially with the decline of socialism
after 1989 and the rise of social-democratic parties in the 1990s. As a result,
the rise of new social movements in the contemporary period, in response to
both modern and global politics, has tended to be conceptualised and
analysed in terms of the social-democratic struggles and their tradition of
interpretation.52 While this unmodified form of general analysis does capture aspects of contemporary democratic struggles over extensive practices
of government, it tends to construe them as all of one kind, as a socialdemocratic variation on familiar struggles for representative government
and democracy (unmodified or modified), and so to overlook and misunderstand their three distinctive features.
Firstly, the terms conduct and comportment are meant to draw attention to a broad range of human action and interaction. Extensive democratic
struggles are not only over the explicit rules, norms, the exchange of public
reasons or the deliberate means of gaining consent in a practice of government. They are at least as much over the pre-reflective yet non-mechanical
modes of comportment that constitute the forms of subjectivity (identities
and roles) of the participants in their circumspective coping and that make
up the vast majority of the coordinated interaction of any practice of
government, from a family to a multinational.53 Similarly, techniques of
government refer just as much to the background processes of subjectivisation and infrastructural governance at a distance by which participants
acquire the dispositions or abilities manifested in their specific modes of
conduct. By focusing on abstract principles and deliberative reasoning,
modern theories of representative government overlook these processes
that occur, not only in market and bureaucratic practices but also in public
practices, beneath the threshold of the formal features of law and democracy. Here, conduct is often governed by immanent norms of efficient
interaction and reflexive monitoring rather than laws and representatives.
For example, the pre-reflective orientation to nature, each other and
52
53
For an excellent overview and defence, see Edward Broadbent, Social Democracy or Liberalism in the
New Millennium, in The Future of Social Democracy: Views of Leaders from Around the World, ed.
Peter Russell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). The rights that Held builds into the
cosmopolitan democratic public law are an extension to global governance of the three classes of rights
of the social-democratic tradition (Democracy and the Global Order, pp. 1923).
See Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heideggers Being and Time, Division 1
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 6087; Schatzki, Social Practices, pp. 13367; and Connolly,
Why I am not a Secularist, pp. 1947, 13762, 16388.
67
themselves that the participants are guided to acquire by participation is

often one of the resources to be enhanced, transformed and ordered
simply for the sake of greater and greater efficiency, yet all this occurs
beyond the reach of modern representative government and democracy.54
An illustration of this phenomenon is the widespread politics of identity
and struggles over recognition. Struggles over recognition began in the modern period, but they have become intensified and dispersed in the contemporary period by the globalisation of cultures and migration.55 These
struggles are over legal, political and constitutional recognition, either in
institutions of representative governments or modified institutions of multilayered global governance. Notwithstanding, they are also struggles over
racist, heterosexist, xenophobic and other non-recognising and misrecognising modes of comportment that hold enormous structures of social and
economic inequality in place despite the formal workings of law and democracy. Such pre-reflective modes of interactive conduct can continue even after
the formal recognition of cultural, ethnic, gender and other differences is
achieved through group rights, federal structures, equity policies and nondiscrimination laws. The effective strategies of democratic freedom in such
cases are counter-practices such as diversity training in the practices of
government in which racist and sexist conduct is learned and internalised.
Here, as David Owen argues, the specific politics of voice of the participants,
rather than the abstract politics of principles, is indispensable to calling into
question, addressing and altering unjust practices of social cooperation.56
Unless the practical activity is addressed, the recourse to the remedies of
representative government and democracy often further entrenches structures of domination as they regulate and alter them. As Taiaiake Alfred
argues, a particularly tragic example is the struggle of Indigenous peoples in
Canada to free themselves from the practice of internal colonisation by
legal, political and constitutional means. Instead of freeing Indigenous
peoples from this long-standing structure, the struggle for recognition has
tended to reproduce it in an altered and ameliorated form without effectively
challenging, negotiating and modifying the forms of deeply sedimented
colonial conduct of both non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples that
54
55
56
Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 338 and Dreyfus, Spinosa and Flores, Disclosing New Worlds, pp. 115.
For processes of subjectivisation see Volume I, Chapter 3.
Held et al., Global Transformations, pp. 283375. See also Anthony H. Richmond, Global Apartheid:
Refugees, Racism and the New World Order (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994).
David Owen, Cultural Diversity and the Conversation of Justice: Reading Cavell on Political Voice
and the Expression of Consent, Political Theory 27(5), 1999: 57996. See also, Susan Bickford, The
Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1996), pp. 14175.
68
sustain it. If Indigenous peoples are to foster and manifest an Indigenous way
of being in the world, then the appropriate strategy of freedom is not only
formal self-government. It must also be the concrete counter-practice of selfconscious traditionalism to modify and pass beyond the colonial modes of
conduct in both representative and extensive practices of government.57
The second distinctive feature of extended practices of government and
democracy is the specific strategies of democratic freedom of questioning,
negotiating and modifying relations of governance. These disputation
strategies take a multitude of forms. Some aim to move the dispute to
courts and parliaments, in either institutions of modern or global governance, and others conform to the model of labour-management negotiations. However, as practices of government are dispersed in processes of
political globalisation and neo-liberal policies of downsizing and contracting-out, many disputes do not conform to these prototypes and are not
brought under the control of representative governments in familiar ways.58
Rather, they are taken up and resolved on site, in a manner that conforms to
the specific practice in question. An entire field of activity comprising all
these more or less autonomous disputes has come into being in the
contemporary era and is now called dispute resolution. In addition, a
new discipline has arisen to study disputes and their resolutions and to
educate specialists to facilitate, mediate and arbitrate, or to educate those
engaged in the negotiations to resolve it themselves. The rapidly expanding
practices of dispute resolution and their accompanying academic discipline
are separate from the practices of representative government and their
accompanying disciplines of political science and political theory.
These activities of disputation and resolution are new forms of democracy
in conditions of political globalisation. They are unique in the following
respects. The disputation is over a practice-specific relation of governance.
Consequently, the way the existing relation is called into question, the
forms of participation and argumentation involved in negotiation and
resolution, and the amendment agreed upon, implemented and monitored
are all grounded in and tied to the conditions of intelligibility of the practice
of government in dispute. That is, the agents involved are embedded in the
world of the relations of power and authority of the practice; they exercise,
appeal to and present their pros and cons in the forms of practical reason
and expertise of the practice from which they speak; it is their very identities
57
58
Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 1999), pp. 5573, 808.
For example, the new partnerships among public, volunteer and private sector institutions.
69
as participants in the practice that are at risk; and the resolution is always
defeasible (open to future challenge). In all these respects, Dreyfus, Spinosa
and Flores point out, democratic disputation and resolution in extensive
practices of government contrasts with the models of democratic deliberation in the public sphere in modern political theory. In these models,
negotiation is supposed to be free of power, based on public reasons and
abstract principles and restricted to disengaged argumentation over a generalisable norm, and resolved by an impartial consensus. The result is a
disengaged discussion of an array of principles divorced from practice;
whereas actual learning and resolution emerge from rootedness in particular
problems and the expertise acquired by risking action from a particular
perspective and learning from ones successes and failures in the context of
power, partisanship and local issues.59
The third and final distinctive feature of extensive practices of government and democracy is their location as nodes enmeshed in local and global
networks. As we have seen in section 3, contemporary practices of government are linked through the global politics of communications and information to complex networks:
This is the new social structure of the Information Age, which I [Castells] call the
network society because it is made up of networks of production, power, and
experience, which construct a culture of virtuality in the global flows that transcend
time and space The network society, as any other social structure, is not absent
of contradictions, social conflicts, and challenges from alternative forms of social
organization. But these challenges are induced by the characteristics of the network
society, and thus, they are sharply distinct from those of the industrial era. The
understanding of our world requires the simultaneous analysis of the network
society, and of its conflictive challenges.60
Taking up this challenge for Canada, Steven Rosell argues that the methods
of organizing and governing that were developed for a world of clearer
boundaries and more limited flows of information in the modern period are
being transformed by the emergence of networks and the resulting restructuring of corporate and public bureaucracies; shifting boundaries between
different sectors of society and levels of government; a growing interest in
direct participation in decision-making; and new challenges to the legitimacy of many traditional institutions.61
59
60
61
Dreyfus, Spinosa and Flores, Disclosing New Worlds, pp. 77, 868.
Castells, End of Millennium, pp. 3501.
Steven A. Rosell, Renewing Governance: Governing by Learning in the Information Age (Toronto:
Oxford University Press, 1999). Quotation is from the back cover.
70
Just as extensive practices of government are in global networks, so too are

the strategies of democratic freedom that challenge them. The conduct of
everyone in a network is affected directly or indirectly by the nodal practice
of government, from suppliers of capital, goods, services and information to
consumers and all those affected by the practice, its products and externalities, and thus they are participants directly or indirectly. The ability to
organise a disputation strategy across this governing network is essential to
challenging the infrastructural practices of government at a distance that
operate along the technological side of the network. Consequently, the
organisation of strategies of freedom in practices of government enmeshed
in contemporary global networks is different from modern forms of representative and extensive democratic organisations. These three distinctive
features of democratic freedom in contemporary political globalisation
conduct, dispute resolution and networking can be illustrated by a brief
sketch drawn from environmental politics.62
An environmental dispute often begins when a specific practice of
coordinated interaction is called into question by some of the participants.
What they challenge is the way in which their activity is organised to act on
the environment, either directly, in production, distribution and consumption, or indirectly, in the ways services obliquely affect the environment. For
example, a multinational forestry company is confronted on one of its sites
by employees or people affected by its practices. Their argument is that the
way their action is governed leads them to relate to and act on the environment in a destructive manner, and thus needs to be changed.
The initial response to such a challenge is to deny that the way private
sector corporations are organised to act on the environment is a legitimate
issue of discussion. The time and efficiency constraints of the global market
and the autonomous development of technology do not allow for a range of
possible relations to the environment. These global processes determine the
relation beyond negotiation. The practices of the company can be limited
from the outside by the institutions of modern representative governments
and international agreements, but not modified by the participants from the
inside. To overcome this reply, the activists have to present plausible arguments that the challenge is itself a legitimate (extensive) democratic action,
that the present relation to the environment is really destructive and could be
otherwise, that local communities would not be adversely affected by the
change, and a host of other legitimate concerns. This involves networking
with a wide range of persons with specific expertise in the company, local
62
I discuss the following example in more detail in Chapter 3, this volume.
71
communities affected, global economics, academic communities and global

communities of concerned specialists. Moreover, they need to organise
another local and global network of people who are able to force the company
to the negotiating table and to keep them there, from workers who want a
clean environment for their children to consumers in distant countries who
want environmentally benign products and investment portfolios.
The on-site negotiations are similarly complex and global, involving a
range of stakeholders with a wide variety of concerns and modes of argumentation: non-unionised and unionised workers, the local Indigenous
peoples with their land claims, the local community, tourist industries,
logging companies and their suppliers and investors, environmental activists,
various academic specialists, local and national political representatives, and
experts in dispute resolution and implementation. The negotiations are in
turn connected almost instantaneously to other similar negotiations across the
globe at other sites and in various legal and political institutions. These
negotiations are not free of power or disengaged. They are complex, strategiccommunicative dialogues involving a wide range of knowledge and forms of
argumentation, enmeshed in the very relations of power and identity formation
that are at issue, and shot through with constraints of time, knowledge,
partiality, inequality and conflicting interests.63
One of the aims of such negotiations is to bring the forest practice under
the control of representative institutions and international laws.64 This
strategy is necessary and laudable in the long term, but it is insufficient.
The general laws and regulations do not change the environmentally
destructive form of conduct and identity formation from the inside; only
the participants themselves, engaging in the democratic activity of disputing
and modifying their modes of conduct, can do this. Environmental legislation
can be watered down in distant representative institutions and manipulated,
ignored and rolled back in practice by powerful economic interests. Finally,
the contemporary trend to the global regulation of the environment appears
to be ineffective and to go along with the disempowerment of local
participants and their practices of democratic disputation and monitoring
of the implementation of specific resolutions.65 Therefore, for such
63
64
65
For the dilemmas of these complex forms of negotiation in contrast to the standard models, see Iris
Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 3874.
Cosmopolitan democracy is a good example of this long-term strategy to entrench environmental
regulation at the local, national and global levels of governance.
See Ralph Nader and L. Wallach, GATT, NAFTA and the Subversion of the Democratic Process,
in The Case Against the Global Economy: And for a Turn Toward the Local, eds. Jerry Mander and
72
strategies of freedom to be effective, the participants must not only develop

unique forms of networking for the phases of initiation, negotiation and
resolution of disputes. They must also develop permanent networks to bind
the immediate company and infrastructural agents to the implementation
and review process of any resolution.
conclusion
This chapter is a defeasible sketch of some forms of democracy in the context
of contemporary globalisation. Much of it will have to be revised as humans
exercise their strategies of freedom in these circumstances over the twenty-first
century. Other political philosophers will fly farther. Still, it has been possible
to go some distance in adumbrating features of democratic practices that the
owl and raven have in store for the twenty-first century. In deference to Hegel,
the principle underlying the new and puzzling ones remains unclear, yet it
appears to be an unsatisfied longing for a certain kind of democratic freedom
of self-government. It seems to be a longing for concrete freedom within the
diverse practices of government in which we find ourselves; a freedom to
question and modify them en passant. From the perspective of my limited
vantage point, the freedom of modern politics, defined in relation to representative popular sovereignty and the rule of law, appears in retrospect to be
one particular form that this concrete democratic freedom of self-government
can take, rather than the comprehensive understanding of human freedom, as
it has been painted throughout the modern period. If freedom is indeed an
always unsatisfied longing, then we can reasonably expect democracy to be
widely practised in more diverse forms in the contemporary period.
If there is to be a distinctive political philosophy in the twenty-first
century, it may well be a philosophy in motion, a philosophy that plays a
mediating role in networking the cautious experiments with modifying our
forms of conduct in practice with the constructive criticism of forms of
knowledge and expertise in the academy. This would be a philosophy that
combines the wisdom of the owl, who seeks to understand who we are and
where we have come from, with the transformative ways of the raven, who is
endlessly curious about where we are heading.66
66
Edward Goldsmith (San Francisco: Sierra Books, 1996); and Nicholas Low and Brendan Gleeson,
Justice, Society and Nature: An Exploration of Political Ecology (London: Routledge, 1998),
pp. 17583.
I wish to thank David Laycock and David Owen for helpful comments on drafts of this chapter.
chapter 3
An ecological ethics for the present
1 three approaches to the central question

In his address to the conference on environmental justice and global ethics
from which this chapter derives, Arne Naess stated that the central question is, how can the fact of cultural and philosophical difference on justice
and nature be reconciled with the urgent need to deliver fair judgments in
cases of conflict between development and the environment, exploitation
and conservation? I agree that this is one of the central questions of the
present. The importance of the question is that it orients critical reflection not
towards some abstract question of world-views or of an imaginary world
beyond conflict, but towards what is happening here and now: to the conflicts
over our relation to the environment and how they are to be addressed. In
response, I would like to sketch an ethics, a way of thinking and acting,
appropriate to this situation of environmental conflict in which we are
engaged. By an ethics, I mean a public philosophy that enables people to
analyse critically cases of environmental conflict on the one hand, and to act
ethically and effectively to bring about fair judgments on the other.1 I will
begin by introducing this type of ecological ethics as a response to the
limitations of two better-known alternative and complementary approaches.
(1) Universal rights. The most prominent approach is to try to work out
very general principles of environmental justice that should apply to any
situation of conflict. These principles are usually articulated in terms of
universal rights and duties, and their global institutionalisation. David
Helds theory of cosmopolitan democracy is an excellent example.2 Notwithstanding its great strengths, cosmopolitan democracy has two limitations
relative to Naess central question.
1
2
See Volume I, Chapter 1 for this approach. I integrate the account of ecological ethics in this chapter
into a broad characterisation of the civic practice of global/local citizenship in Chapter 9, this volume.
Held, Democracy and the Global Order and Held, Democracy and Globalization.
73
74
Its perspective is the long term, not the urgent need to deliver fair
judgments in immediate cases of conflict. Also, it does not start from
the present cultural and philosophical difference on justice and nature.
Rather, it takes autonomy to be the supreme value and derives universal
environmental rights, duties and institutions from it. Democratic discussions of conflicts over the environment take place within this framework of
the accepted priority of autonomy and the rights and duties derived from it.
This raises three objections. Firstly, as Charles Taylor argues, the very idea
of deriving a system of justice from a single value is dubious. There are
always several values, principles and goods brought to bear by participants
in conflicts, whose ordering, interpretation and application are open to
disagreement and which vary to some extent from case to case.3 Secondly,
most ecologists would not rank autonomy as highly as Held does, let alone
exclusively, and thus the thought experiment by which he tries to establish
it would fail. For example, Fritjof Capra suggests that the relevant ecological
values are not autonomy, but interdependence, recycling, partnership,
flexibility, diversity, and as a consequence of all those, sustainability.4
Thirdly, as we have seen in Chapter 9 of Volume I, if environmental justice
is to be democratic, then the principles, values and goods that are brought
to bear in a conflict must themselves be open to democratic discussion
and debate. They cannot be decided monologically by a theorist but must
be agreed to by the people affected by the conflict through democratic
dialogue.
(2) Discourse morality. The other approach takes the democratic objection
seriously and leaves it to citizens themselves to reach agreements on the norms
of environmental justice in processes and institutions of deliberation over
cases of conflict. The aim of this dialogical or deliberative approach, accordingly, is to work out the conditions of fair and just deliberation among all
those affected by a conflict over the environment. John Rawls conception of
an overlapping consensus and Jrgen Habermas theory of discourse ethics
are two well-known examples of this approach.5 The basic idea is the rule
of democratic legitimacy, quod omnes tangit what affects all must be agreed
to by all. In Habermas formulation, the democratic principle D is that
3
4
5
Charles Taylor, Reply and Re-Articulation, in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of
Charles Taylor in Question, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 2469.
Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (New York: Anchor
Books, 1997), p. 304.
Rawls, Political Liberalism and Political Liberalism: Reply to Habermas; Habermas, Moral
Consciousness and Communicative Action, and Habermas, Reconciliation Through the Public Use of
Reason.
75
only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the
approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse.6 However, as many commentators have pointed out, there are
limitations to this approach as well. Both Rawls and Habermas screen out
rather than allow for deep cultural and philosophical differences,7 although a
modified version of Rawls theory has been advanced in response to this
objection.8 Yet, as Low and Gleeson persuasively argue, any reasonable and
practicable global ecological ethics and politics should be specifically
designed to reinforce and constitute cultural diversity.9
A necessary condition of resolving disputes over the environment is that
peoples background conceptions of justice and nature are brought into the
discussion and criticised through the exchange of reasons. This is, for
example, the democratic way to bring about what many ecologists see as a
paradigm shift from a mechanistic to an ecological view of nature.10
However, in Rawls theory, and models of dispute resolution based on it,
a reasonable pluralism of conceptions of nature is accepted as the given
background on the basis of which citizens enter into discussions to reach an
overlapping consensus on principles of justice. Although this conservative
approach may occasionally yield agreements on relatively shallow conflicts,
it does not enable the participants to call into question the deeply sedimented background conceptions of nature that block fundamental change,
such as the dominant view that environmental damage is an externality or
that nature can sustain unlimited growth.
Although Habermas theory allows for a wider range of critical questioning, it excludes from discussion the very form of ethical reasoning that
ecological conflicts require according to the vast majority of ecologists.
Habermas draws a sharp distinction between dialogical moral reasoning
(where deontological questions of justice for each and every individual
obtain) and dialogical ethical reasoning (where evaluative questions of the
common good for the members of a community obtain) and holds that only
the former has the capacity for universal and unconditional agreement.11 For
him, this differentiation of justice from ethics has to be accepted as an
inescapable feature of modernisation.12 However, for many ecologists it is
precisely the attempt to differentiate the just from the good and to treat
6
7
9
11
12
Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 66.

8
See Tully, Strange Multiplicity; and Chapter 4, this volume.
Laden, Reasonably Radical.
Low and Gleeson, Justice, Society and Nature, p. 194. 10 Capra, The Web of Life.
Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 108; William Rehg, Insight and Solidarity:
The Discourse Ethics of Jrgen Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 92150.
Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, pp. 1720.
76
humans as autonomous entities that is the basis of the conflict. For ethical
ecologists, humans exist within, are dependent upon and are members of the
web of life, the innumerable ecosystems that make up the living world, Gaia,
which westerners call the environment.13 As Low and Gleeson conclude, the
relationship between humanity and nature is best described as asymmetrically
co-dependent. We can appreciate today that the survival of the natural world
is dependent upon what humanity does. At the same time, humanity remains
completely dependent for survival upon non-human nature, that is to say
upon our planetary biosphere and all its inhabitants.14
(3) Ecological ethics. This ecocentric as opposed to egocentric view of
humanitys place in the world is the basis of the deep ecology, social ecology,
ecofeminism and spiritual ecology.15 In addition, it is the emerging vision of
the interconnected network of all forms of life in the life sciences and
systems theories.16 Moreover, as Capra points out, it accords with the
cultural and spiritual wisdom of the ages:
Ultimately, deep ecological awareness is spiritual or religious awareness. When the
concept of the human spirit is understood as the mode of consciousness in which the
individual feels a sense of belonging, of connectedness, to the cosmos as a whole, it
becomes clear that ecological awareness is spiritual in its deepest essence. It is, there
fore, not surprising that the emerging new vision of reality based on deep ecological
awareness is consistent with the so called perennial philosophy of spiritual traditions,
whether we talk about the spirituality of Christian mystics, that of Buddhists, or the
philosophy and cosmology underlying Native American traditions.17
If a basic aspect of the human condition is an interdependent relation in

the environmental network or web or life, then the question arises as to
what ethical comportment should humans take to this relationship of
interdependency within the larger eco-communities or ecosystems? The
answer is that we should take up the appropriate attitude of care, concern,
respect, responsibility and perhaps awe for the value of all living things
which compose the larger web of life.18 This ethical orientation to the
common good of the eco-community will be an inseparable dimension,
therefore, of any democratic discussion aimed at reaching fair judgments in
conflicts over the environment. Of course, deontological questions of
justice remain, but these cannot be discussed in isolation from the ethical
questions of our relation to nature.19 For example, the six principles of
13
15
16
18
19
Capra, The Web of Life, pp. 316. 14 Low and Gleeson, Justice, Society and Nature, pp. 1556.
Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 61156.
Capra, The Web of Life, pp. 157285. 17 Ibid., p. 7.
Low and Gleeson, Justice, Society and Nature, pp. 13355; Capra, The Web of Life, p. 12.
Low and Gleeson, Justice, Society and Nature, pp. 1567.
77
ecological sustainability presented by Mark Diesendorf and Clive

Hamilton in Human Ecology, Human Economy illustrate the inseparability
of ethical, moral and ecological considerations: the conservation of biodiversity and ecological integrity, the conservation of cultural diversity, the
improvement of individual and community wellbeing, intergenerational
equity, the precautionary principle and community participation in decisionmaking.20 If this analysis of humanitys relation to nature and an ethical
orientation to that relation is correct, then Habermas has the relation
between morality and ethics the wrong way round. It is ecological ethics
that is global and universal whereas deontological morality is one limited,
species-centric, or egocentric, perspective. This reaffirmation of the priority
of ethico-political reasoning is one of the many lessons of the classic text on
ecological political economy by Herman Daly and John Cobb, tellingly
entitled For the Common Good.21
Accordingly, any ethical approach to ecology, including the one presented here, will address the central concerns of ethics: What ethical
orientation should we take to our relationship of interdependency with
other members of the web or community of life (care, stewardship, respect)?
Why should we adopt this orientation (scientific, spiritual, pragmatic)?
What practices of self and group formation should we engage in to constitute ourselves as fit members? What is the telos or good of this way of
being in the world?22 There is a plurality of answers to these concerns and so
a plurality of ways of acting ethically in relation to the environment today,
as there has been historically even within European societies.23
These considerations also lead to the reformulation of the democratic
principle D. All affected must include not just humans but all living
things, and not just this generation but future generations. Since all cannot
be actual participants in a practical discourse over a case of conflict, they
must be represented in some form. Hence, a realistic principle of democratic legitimacy will be a principle of representative democracy, under
which at least some representatives will take up the responsibility for
presenting the ethical considerations of care for all members in the web of
life affected by the conflict in question.
20
21
22
23
Mark Diesendorf and Clive Hamilton, eds., Human Ecology, Human Economy: Ideas for an
Ecologically Sustainable Future (St Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1997), pp. 6498.
Herman Daly and John B. Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward
Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).
Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, pp. 2832.
Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient
Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
78
Finally, Habermas makes the highly idealised assumption that the practical
discourse over how to resolve a conflict over the environment is free of
relations of power. He does this in order to develop a normative form of
argumentation which can be employed as a regulative ideal to judge the
validity of any actual negotiation. However, rather than throwing critical light
on actual cases of conflict and their resolution, this approach tends to lead to
abstract and utopian theory.24 If we are to develop a form of analysis that is
enlightening and enabling with respect to actual cases of conflict, then it has
to take the form of an immanent critique of, rather than an abstraction from,
the existing relations of power in any process of democratic negotiation over
an environmental conflict. I agree with Michel Foucaults objection to this
feature of Habermas discourse ethics and his alternative to it:
The idea that there could exist a state of communication that would allow games of
truth to circulate freely, without any constraints or coercive effects, seems utopian
to me. This is precisely a failure to see that power relations are not something that is
bad in itself, that we have to break free of. I do not think that society can exist
without power relations, if by that one means the strategies by which individuals try
to direct and control the conduct of others. The problem, then, is not to try to
dissolve them in the utopia of completely transparent communication but to
acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the
ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as
little domination as possible.25
In summary, an appropriate ecological ethics for the conflictual world we

inhabit will seek to overcome the limitations of these two better-known
approaches in responding to Naess central question. It will start from actual
contests over ecologically damaging forms of conduct in relation to nature
and the modes of dispute resolution that arise from them. It will accept
value pluralism, cultural diversity and the principle of representative
democracy, and allow for the critical discussion of cultural and philosophical differences over justice and nature, including egocentric and ecocentric
orientations, in the process of reaching fair judgments. It will also analyse
what lies at the centre of the conflict the existing power relations that
direct and control the disputed relations to nature and this with an aim of
changing these relations in accord with a more appropriate ethical mode of
care for the network of living beings affected. It also will be an experimental
24
25
Ricardo Blaug, Between Fear and Disappointment: Critical, Empirical and Political Uses of
Habermas, Political Studies 45(1), 1997: 10017.
Michel Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, in The Essential Works,
Vol. I, p. 298; and see Volume I, Chapter 3 for the basis of my adaptation of Foucaults approach in
this chapter.
79
and prudential ethos, rather than a universal solution, in the sense that
critical reflection on one experiment in modifying our relation to nature will
provide the basis for the next.
The main aspects of this ecological ethics are presented in the following
three sections: practical systems: the context in which conflicts over the
environment arise; negotiations over the central question: the ethical and
strategic activity of reaching fair judgments in cases of conflict democratically; and implementation and review: the responsibility of critically
monitoring environmental agreements and their institutionalisation. A
brief defence of this approach concludes the chapter.
2 practical systems
The first step in this ecological ethics is to examine the practical context in
which the central question arises. The context is, as we have seen, a conflict
between development and the environment or exploitation and conservation. That is, the way a specific form of organised activity or practice affects the
environment is called into question and challenged, and a conflict arises over
how to settle it between (schematically) those who support development and
those who support sustainability. Before turning to the procedures of democratic negotiation, let us analyse the form of organised activity in which we are
constituted as agents acting on nature and over which the dispute irrupts. This
can be anything from the recycling of waste paper in an office to activities of
resource extraction and production, that is, any coordinated human activity
that affects the environment. I would like to adapt the form of analysis Michel
Foucault and his students have developed for the critical study of conflicts or
struggles to challenge and modify various practices of human activity. He calls
the organised forms of human activity he studied throughout his career
practical systems and analyses them in the following way:
Here we are taking as a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations
that men give of themselves, not the conditions that determine them without their
knowledge, but rather what they do and the way they do it. That is, the forms of
rationality that organize their ways of doing things (this might be called the
technological aspect) and the freedom with which they act within these practical
systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the rules of the game, up to a certain
point (this might be called the strategic side of these practices). The homogeneity of
these historico critical analyses is thus ensured by this realm of practices, with their
technological side and their strategic side.
These practical systems stem from three broad areas: relations of control over
things, relations of actions upon others, relations with oneself. This does not mean
80
that each of these three areas is completely foreign to the others. It is well known
that control over things is mediated by relations with others; and relations with
others in turn always entail relations with oneself, and vice versa. But we have three
axes whose specificity and whose interconnections have to be analyzed: the axis of
knowledge, the axis of power, the axis of ethics. In other words, the historical
ontology of ourselves must answer an open series of questions; it must make an
indefinite number of inquiries which may be multiplied and specified as much as
we like, but which will all address the questions systematized as follows: How are
we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as
subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as
moral subjects of our own actions?26
The technological side of a practical system is the context for ecological

ethics and the strategic side is the actual ethical activity in this context.
Turning to the analysis of the four areas of the technological aspect, a
practical system will involve, firstly, relations of production and distribution
that affect the environment. The participants in the system (such as
workers, managers, distributors, consumers, investors) will be constrained
to act in accordance with, to sustain and to develop these productive and
distributive relations, or, from an ecological perspective, relations to the
environment, as we can call them (roughly Foucaults relations of control
over things). Secondly, the conduct of the humans engaged in sustaining
and developing these relations to the environment will be directed and
controlled by two types of power relations, or, as Foucault calls them
elsewhere, relations of governmentality or simply government in the
broad sense of any mode of guiding the thought and action of others in a
relatively stable and predictable way.27 Their conduct will be governed more
or less by the regulations and laws of the firm, sector, union, municipality,
provincial and regional governments, nation-state, NAFTA, the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), WTO and international laws,
treaties and agreements of various kinds. There will also be a complex
system of governance, rarely democratic, of the specific practical system
itself, involving the coordinated interaction of workers, unions, technicians,
managers, directors, CEOs, shareholders, reflexive monitors and so on,
through which the regulations and laws are operationalised or evaded.28
Foucaults relations of action upon others refers to both these types of
power relations and the ways in which they constitute the forms of
26
27
28
Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, in The Essential Works, Vol. I, pp. 31718.

Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, pp. 21626; Dean,
Governmentality, p. 42.
Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, pp. 21719.
81
subjectivity of the practitioners of the system (that is, the mental and
behavioural competencies characteristic of their roles).
Thirdly, members of a practical system will have distinctive ways of thinking and acting within the broad relations of governance of the system (what
Foucault refers to as relations with oneself or the axis of ethics). Each of these
three areas involves forms of knowledge (scientific, technical, managerial,
environmental, regulatory, administrative, economic, legal, political and psychological disciplines) that are employed in production and distribution, and
in the governance of men and women. Fourthly, as Foucault mentions in
another text, a practical system also involves relations of communication
through which the agents involved coordinate their various activities.29
As Mitchell Dean summarises, the analysis of the forms of rationality of
a practical system is a study of a system of governmentality:
Government [or governmentality] is any more or less calculated and rational activity,
undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of
techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks to shape conduct by working through
our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs, for definite but shifting ends and has a
diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes. An
analysis of government, then, is concerned with the means of calculation, both
qualitative and quantitative, the type of governing authority or agency, the forms
of knowledge, technique and other means employed, the entity to be governed and
how it is conceived, the ends sought and the outcomes and consequences.30
Studies of four areas of practical systems and their interconnections will be

necessarily wide-ranging: examining both the local context and its global
connections, what is happening right now and critical histories of the
formation of the specific relations to nature.31
If the technological aspect of practical systems is the context in which
humans are constituted as subjects acting on nature in a certain way, then
the strategic side of the practices is the freedom they have to call the
practice into question, to enter into some form of conflict and to seek to
modify the rules of the game up to a certain point. Any relation of power,
no matter how strictly enforced, involves the possibility of freedom on the
part of those over whom it is exercised. Power is exercised only over free
subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or
collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several
ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be
29
31
Ibid., pp. 21619. 30 Dean, Governmentality, p. 42.

ric Darier, Foucault and the Environment: An Introduction, in Discourses of the Environment, ed.
ric Darier (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Paul Rutherford, The Entry of Life into History, in Discourses
of the Environment.
82
realized.32 Hence, a case of conflict over some area of the technological

organisation of a practical system is, in Foucaults terms, the strategic
exercise of freedom by the members who call into question and challenge
the prevailing rules of the game. He characterises the permanent relation
between power and freedom as an agonism, the permanent possibility of
contesting, rather than acting in accord with, a relation of power:
At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the
recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of
an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an agonism of a relationship
which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a face to face
confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.33
An environmental conflict erupts, therefore, when some members of a

practical system call into question and contest the degrading relation to the
environment their organised activities sustain and develop. Applying the
democratic principle that what affects all must be approved by all, any
living member of the ecological web of life affected by the productive or
distributive activities of a practical system, or their representative, may be
considered a member with the democratic right to call the activities into
question. Since the ecological effects of a local system are often global, there
is a disjuncture, as Held puts it, between the traditional understanding of a
democratic community bounded by a territorial nation-state and the global
reach of environmental degradation.34 For example, consumers or members
of Greenpeace in distant countries organise democratically to boycott the
products of Canadian forest companies in order to contest and modify their
environmentally damaging forest practices, in concert with environmental
activities at the local sites of forestry.
The emergence of local conflicts and democratic action throughout the
affected network of life, independent of the country of origin of the environmental problem, may lead in the long run to the extension of the traditional
legal and political institutions of Western representative democracy to the
global level, as cosmopolitan democrats hope. However, this is not the case in
the present. The emerging global institutions form an unacceptable and
ineffective negotiated order of global governance,35 and the general trend
of the institutions, such as NAFTA and WTO, is in the opposite direction:
to disempower local democracies and deregulate production and
32
33
34
35
Ibid., pp. 2212.
Held, Democracy and the Global Order, and Held, Democracy and Globalization, pp. 1920.
Low and Gleeson, Justice, Society and Nature, pp. 17583.
83
distribution.36 Rather, these forms of conflict, organised strategically in

immediate response to the specific area of the practical system in which
they are engaged, and coordinated with other site-specific struggles
throughout the affected network of life, should be seen and studied carefully
in their own right, as a quite distinct form of the relocalisation or econetworking of democratic ecological politics.37
To call a specific relation to the environment into question, one needs of
course to show how it adversely affects the environment, to be able to
challenge the validity of the scientific knowledge that is employed to legitimate
the practical system in its present form. It needs also to be shown that the
relation could be otherwise, that this activity, or a suitable substitute, could
be organised in a way that cares for and sustains the environment. It is easy
enough to state this in general terms, as Herman Daly points out,38 but, to be
convincing in the negotiations leading to fair judgments, the case must always
be made specifically; that is, for this locale and this ecoregion.39 These changes
in turn almost always entail modification in the four areas of the technological
side of the practical system, even in the relations of communication, say, if
only to get the proposed changes on the agenda. In order to be convincing, one
needs to show that the prevailing form of organisation is historically contingent and could be otherwise, and indeed to be able to present an alternative
that is ecologically sound and responsive to the legitimate concerns of those
affected by the changes (workers, local groups, consumers and so on).
Moreover, one needs knowledge of early attempts, or similar attempts elsewhere, to change the system in question, so that the strategic activity is not
needlessly ineffective, easily co-opted or does not reinvent the wheel. This is
why detailed studies of the technological side of the practical system are
indispensable to an effective ecological ethics on the strategic side.
3 negotiations over the central question
Let us now imagine that some members of a practical system have been able
to call its relation to the environment into question and those who exercise
power have been constrained to respond by entering into negotiations of
36
37
38
39
Nader and Wallach, GATT, NAFTA and the Subversion of the Democratic Process.
Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy: And for a Turn
Toward the Local (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), pp. 393514; Foucault, The Subject and
Power, in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, pp. 21112.
Herman E. Daly, Sustainable Growth? No Thank You, in The Case Against the Global Economy,
pp. 1956.
Kirkpatrick Sale, Principles of Bioregionalism, in The Case Against the Global Economy.
84
some kind in order to resolve the conflict.40 That is, it is a case of conflict in
which Naess central question arises. As we have seen, such a conflict can
occur anywhere, from the traditional legal and political institutions of
representative democracies, to negotiations over environmental amendments to NAFTA, to site-specific struggles of local democracy in the
workplace, dump site, forests, stores and so on. More often than not, they
occur across the two types of power relations that govern systems of production and distribution mentioned above: the negotiated order of local,
regional, national and international governance, and the forms of governmentality of the practical system in question. Members of a practical system
demand a say in the way in which they are directed to act on the environment,
thereby democratising the system to that extent, and they coordinate these
activities with traditional political and legal action.
The importance of the local action in the first instance is that it challenges
an organised form of activity from the inside. Recall that a practical system
constitutes to a considerable extent the characteristic ways of thinking and
acting in regard to the environment of its members; that is, their forms of
self-awareness and self-formation. The fact that they are able to challenge
these powerful processes of subjectification shows that we are not completely determined by the systems in which we are engaged. Further, the
challenge is not vague or abstract, unrelated to concrete practice, but a
specific way of thinking and acting differently that emerges in the context
of, and in an agonistic relation to, the sedimented structures of environmentally degrading activity it problematises. In this way, the practice of
ecological ethics takes place on the ground of practical systems and the
strategies of freedom to modify them from within.
In the first section, I enumerated the sorts of normative conditions that
render such negotiations legitimate. The people and other living stakeholders in the ecosystem affected by the contested form of activity, and so
having a say directly or through representatives, will be various; they will
have a variety of different concerns, and a variety of cultural and philosophical ways of seeing the situation and presenting their pros and cons.41 The
studies of the technological aspect of the practical system will equip ecologists to enter into the various specialised negotiations over the scientific,
economic, legal and political ramifications of the current system and the
proposed changes. In addition, the studies of the relations of power prepare
participants to respond to fake negotiations, backsliding, bribes, threats to
40
41
For the background to this account of negotiation, see Volume I, Chapter 9.

Young, Communication and the Other.
85
close and relocate, and the like, as well as to organise their own networks of
support both locally and globally.
One of the most difficult exercises in negotiating fair judgments is
bringing the other side around from a perspective of unlimited growth
and development to see the situation from an ecological point of view: that
is, from our interdependency in the web of life and an ethical stance of care.
The forms of practical reasoning in negotiations with others who have
different perspectives are much more complex than simply taking a yes
or no position on a proposed norm of action-coordination and giving ones
reasons.42 Those who wish to introduce an ecological orientation of sustainability need to show how it relates to the values, principles and goods the
others already hold as well as showing how it answers their legitimate
concerns about employment, efficiency, future generations and a host of
other considerations. Furthermore, these discussions often take place across
cultural, philosophical, class, gender, age, regional and other differences on
the central issues.
At the heart of ecological ethics, therefore, is the principle of audi alteram
partem, always listen to the other side. This is not simply a duty of respect to
differently situated others who have an equally legitimate right to speak and
be listened to. The way in which we listen to others who have different
points of view, enter into multilogue to try to understand where they are
coming from, then try to respond in a way that enables them to understand
our point of view is also how we free ourselves from our own sedimented
self-understanding of our relation to the environment. This difficult form of
critical multilogue enables the participants to see the limited and partial
character of their self-understandings; to begin to move around to a broader
view of the relevant considerations; and so open the possibility of reaching a
fair judgment. The negotiations are not simply a site of strategic bargaining.
They are the intersubjective multilogues in which we come to acquire
and appreciate the cultural and biological diversity of our interdependent
relationship to all relevant aspects of the web of life.43 This is a form of
self-awareness and self-consciousness (diversity or aspect awareness)
appropriate to an ecological ethics.
Two examples will illustrate this point. As Naess suggests, negotiations
are often characterised in such broad oppositions as development versus the
environment and exploitation versus conservation. One of the advantages
42
43
David Walton, The New Dialectic: Conversational Contexts of Argument (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1998).
Tully, Strange Multiplicity, pp. 183212
86
of entering into complex negotiations with the kind of studies outlined

above is that these broad oppositions tend to break down in the course of
the discussions. The public negotiations over the forest system on the
north-west coast of North America have been structured for many years
around development versus care for the environment: development and
employment were claimed to be dependent on respecting the imperatives of
capitalist growth and the globalisation of the economy. By studying the
local economy and the forest industry and its relations to the global
economy, Michael MGonigle,44 Patricia Marchak45 and Jeremy Wilson46
have shown that this is a misleading and disempowering way to structure
the debate. They argue that present forest practices of extraction and export
not only destroy the environment but also lead to a decrease in employment
and the destruction of local communities and economies. Alternatively,
MGonigle in particular has argued convincingly that ecologically sound
forest practices organised on local and regional bases are compatible with,
and the means to, an increase in local employment and a more diverse and
self-reliant economy. Thus, by a careful analysis of the practical system and
the possibility of modifying it, the way the discussions have been structured
by the powers that be has been changed, and those concerned about jobs
have been brought around to see their concern addressed persuasively from
an ecological perspective.
The second example is negotiations involving land use with Indigenous
peoples. As is now well known, Indigenous peoples bring to the negotiations quite distinctive practices in relation to nature.47 If non-Indigenous
people are to understand what they are saying and to learn from them, then
they need to be able to free themselves from their own unreflective understanding of the environment and their relation to it, whatever it may be.48
They can do this, as far as I know, only through the kind of critical dialogue
of reciprocal elucidation sketched above, such as the two-way or ganma
dialogue developed by the Yolnga people of Arnhemland.49
44
45
46
47
48
49
Michael MGonigle, Forestopia (Vancouver: Harbour Publishing, 1994).

M. Patricia Marchak, Logging the Globe (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 1995).
Jeremy Wilson, Talk and Log: Wilderness Politics in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press, 1998).
Galarrwuy Yunupingu, ed., Our Land is Our Life: Land Rights: Past, Present and Future (St Lucia:
University of Queensland Press, 1997).
Peter Knudtson and David Suzuki, Wisdom of the Elders: Honoring Sacred Native Visions of Nature
(Toronto: Stoddard Press, 1992).
Helen Watson with the Yolnga community at Yirrkala and David Wade Chambers, Singing the Land,
Signing the Land: A Portfolio of Exhibits (Geelong, Vic: Deakin University Press, 1989).
87
The objective of these discussions is not to exchange Western and

Indigenous world-views on the environment, but to understand the different practices in which Western environmental knowledge and the traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous peoples are embodied. The
specific ecological practices of Indigenous peoples are analogous to the
practices by which non-Indigenous peoples are led in their practical systems
to recognise themselves under a specific relation to the environment. I do
not see how we can understand what Indigenous peoples are trying to say
about alternative ecological practices unless we have, by means of the
analyses outlined above, grasped the ecological practices in which our
own thought and action are shaped and formed. It puts us in a position
to enter into a dialogue with them, to come around to see our relation to
nature from their point of view, and so to begin the important and indispensable exercise of learning comparatively from each others ecological
practices through cross-cultural dialogue.
Historical studies of the formation of Western practices can also play an
important critical role in these dialogues. In societies founded on the internal
colonisation of Indigenous peoples, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand
and the United States, the destruction of the diversity of Indigenous cultures
and the imposition of a dominant settler culture have gone along historically
with the destruction of Indigenous biodiversity and the implantation of an
imperial ecology.50 These two processes of subduing Indigenous peoples and
Indigenous biodiversity, the strategies of freedom Indigenous and nonIndigenous peoples have exercised in resistance to them, and the long and
uneven interaction between them are beginning to be studied historically.
These historical studies enable us to think critically about our relation to nature
in the present by showing that our current practices are neither necessary nor
universal, but historically contingent and capable of being otherwise.51
Finally, any judgment reached by the negotiators, no matter how fair,
will never be the definitive resolution of the central question or a consensus.
There are several reasons for this. Asymmetries of power, knowledge,
influence and resources will play their role in any negotiations. Real-time
constraints entail that a judgment will be made before all those affected have
been heard or have reached agreement. Unanticipated consequences in the
50
51
Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 9001900 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Volume I, Chapters 7 and 8.
Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (London:
University of North Carolina Press, 1989); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists
and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
88
implementation of the agreement may show that those who dissented were
right after all. Moreover, in any complex discussion and agreement there is
always room for reasonable disagreement.52 As Foucault puts this rather
obvious but often overlooked factor of indeterminacy:
With regard to the multiple games of truth, one can see that ever since the Greeks
our society has been marked by the lack of a precise and peremptory definition of
the games of truth which are permitted to the exclusion of all others. In a given
game of truth, it is always possible to discover something different and to more or
less modify this or that rule, and sometimes even the entire game of truth.53
The indeterminacy in games of truth holds in the specific case of the human
and natural sciences of the environment as well (this is the example Foucault
uses to illustrate his general point). It follows that in any agreement we reach
on procedures, principles, ethics, scientific studies or policies with respect to
the environment, including any ecological paradigm, there will always be an
element of reasonable disagreement, and thus the possibility of raising a
reasonable doubt and dissenting. Any judgment, whether global or local,
will be a negotiated accommodation or reasonable compromise involving an
element of non-consensus, not a definitive and peremptory consensus on
the environment and our relation to it. Consequently, the agreement and its
institutional implementation must themselves be seen as experimental and
provisional: that is, open to review, question and challenge.
4 implementation and review
This form of ecological ethics, then, directs critical attention to the institutions of implementation of agreements on the environment just as much as
to the principles and procedures for reaching agreements. There are two
reasons for this. The first, as we have just seen, is the imperfection of any
agreement. None will be the definitive resolution of the central question in
a case of conflict. There will thus always be the need to review and often call
into question its implementation, and so to begin all over again.
The second reason is that the agents come to the negotiations with
an understanding of the practical system out of which the conflict has arisen
and in which the agreement has to be implemented. So, their ethical concern
will be to link, as closely as possible, the considerations of environmental
52
53
See Volume I, Chapter 9 for these factors.

Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self , p. 297.
89
principles, global ethics and policies embodied in the agreement with its
institutionalisation and application in practice, where it modifies the way
they act on the environment. Yet, there is a tenuous connection between
local agreements, charters of environmental rights and duties, precautionary
principles, laws and regulations on one side, and their interpretation and
application in day-to-day and year-to-year practice on the other. The ways
any rule can be followed are wide and divergent, not to mention the ability
of powerful parties to drag their feet or dissimulate compliance. I am not
saying that agreements and institutions across the negotiated order of
governance from the local to the global are not important. Quite the
opposite. Because there is neither a definitive form of them nor a selfguaranteeing mode of implementation, they are too important to be left
beyond the bounds of ecological theory and practice, as if they were some
sort of separate and merely supplementary field. Ecological ethics does not
come to rest with an agreement or an institution. It is a permanent task.
conclusion
In conclusion, I would like to respond to one objection to the form of
ecological ethics I have outlined. As we have seen, this form of ethics is a
response to the limitations of two better-known and more universal environmental approaches, cosmopolitan democracy and discourse ethics. In
contrast to them, it tends to concentrate on the present and to ground
ethical activity in local practices, networked with other similar activities; it
also contemplates an ecologically sound global network of institutions and
practices developing in due course and in unpredictable forms on this firm
foundation. It is an ethics of thinking globally and acting locally. The
objection is that there is a danger of being overwhelmed by global processes
behind the backs and beyond the control of these fragile specific activities
and their ad hoc networks.
One form of this objection is that the global system of capitalist production, distribution and finance is invulnerable to these specific struggles.
Such an economic system requires a global and systemic response to
counterbalance its environmentally damaging effects. In reply, I find this
way of thinking about global capitalism misleading and disempowering. It
is misleading because the capitalist economy is not a closed, well-defined,
self-steering and boundary-maintaining system in the required sense
implied by defenders of global capitalism on one side and ecosocialists on
the other. Rather, as Theodore Schatzki argues, it is a complex network, or
constellation of networks, of overlapping and criss-crossing heterogeneous
90
practical systems.54 The systemic characterisation of global capitalism is

disempowering because it makes it appear that ecologically concerned
citizens are powerless to act where they live and work. If, conversely, the
global system is a congeries of practical systems, then the most effective
place to act is in the practical systems in which we find ourselves.
The second response is that this form of ecological ethics also looks
forward to the long term, by promoting here and now the form of activity
that will be constitutive of any ecological future. It consists in local democratic activity, and this democratic activity is oriented towards making the
local, bioregional practices more ecologically benign and economically selfreliant. In this respect, it is in opposition to economic globalisation and the
attempts to regulate the environment through global agencies, for, as was
mentioned earlier, these tend to be ineffective and anti-democratic.55
The third response is that large-scale change in processes, structures and
sedimented forms of thought that adversely affect the environment is brought
about, I believe, by changing the practices in which they are embedded and
reproduced. It is our routine acting that holds these seemingly autonomous
systems in place. Acting differently, exercising our freedom here and now, can
change them. This has been the teaching of the great philosophers of practice
from Marx to Wittgenstein and Foucault, and I see no good reason to doubt it.
Finally, this practice-based approach has the potential of bringing
together four areas of ecology that are currently fragmented: multidisciplinary studies of the practical systems in which we are constituted as subjects
acting on nature; the local struggles and ecological movements that call
these into question in practice; normative and empirical studies of the
proliferating institutions and procedures of dispute resolution of conflicts
over the environment; and critical, reflexive monitoring of the implementation of environmental accords. Analogous to the way Marx sought to
reorient political economy around practical struggles over the relations of
production in his day, this ethics could reorient political ecology around
practical struggles over relations to the environment in our day.
Even if these responses have some validity, the risk of being determined
by processes beyond our control remains. Our critical investigations and
ethical activities are always limited, partly determined, humble, less than we
hoped for. But this just means, as Foucault said in response to a similar
objection, we are always in the position of beginning again.56
54
55
56
Schatzki, Social Practices, pp. 2215.

Mander and Goldsmith, The Case Against the Global Economy.
chapter 4
The unfreedom of the moderns in comparison

to their ideals of constitutional democracy
introduction
This is a period of rapid constitutional and democratic change around the
world. Old and new constitutions local, national, supranational, regional,
global are in transition and so are old and new concepts of constitutionalism. One response of political philosophers has been to reflect critically on
the prevailing principles of legitimacy of constitutional democracy in the
light of these changes in practice, testing the adequacy of the principles in
one direction and the legitimacy of the changes in the other. In this fourth
chapter I would like to make a constructive contribution to this on-going
European and North American debate over constitutional democracy by
presenting and defending public philosophy and civic freedom as an effective way to criticise and democratise globalisation from above. I do this by
starting within the debates over a range of dominant and agonistic
approaches, and showing how, step by step, internal criticisms of their
limitations lead to the more radical, practice-based and civic freedomoriented public philosophy in a new key.
The first section provides a brief synopsis of work on the principles of
legitimacy over the last ten years, laying out two principles of constitutional
democracy and six main features of how they work together in testing the
legitimacy of democratic constitutional practice. The second section sets
out three large-scale trends of constitutional change in practice from the
perspective worked up in section 1 and suggests that these trends threaten or
diminish democratic freedom. The third section examines two major ways
Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the University of Exeter colloquium on
Constitutionalism, Democracy and Citizenship: Current Debates, 2426 November 2000, and the
University of Leeds conference on Constitutionalism in Transition, 5 July 2001. I would like to thank
all the participants at both conferences for their helpful discussion of these issues and in particular,
Richard Bellamy, Avigail Eisenberg, Alessandro Ferraro, Colin Harvey, David Held, Anthony Laden,
Martin Loughlin, Jocelyn MacLure, Chantal Mouffe, David Owen, Peter Oliver, Bill Scheuerman, Jo
Shaw, Quentin Skinner and Neil Walker.
91
92
in which political philosophers have responded to these trends by employing the principles of section 1. The fourth section examines a third response
and uses it to sketch out a direction for further critical inquiry, one tied
more tightly to the reciprocal elucidation of principles and democratic
activity.1 A short conclusion rounds off the discussion by comparing this
interpretation of the present situation to Benjamin Constants picture of
the situation of constitutional democracy in Europe in 1819 in his famous
speech at the Athne Royal in Paris, The Liberty of the Ancients
Compared with that of the Moderns.2
1 two principles and six features
of constitutional democracy
From the exchange between Jrgen Habermas and John Rawls in 1995 to
the present, two critical and abstract principles have been singled out as
guiding norms for the critical discussion of the conditions of legitimacy of
contemporary forms of political association.3 These are (i) the principle of
constitutionalism (or the rule of law) and (ii) the principle of democracy
(or popular sovereignty). The principle of constitutionalism (or the rule of
law) requires that the exercise of political power in the whole and in every
part of any constitutionally legitimate system of political, social and economic cooperation should be exercised in accordance with and through a
general system of principles, rules and procedures, including procedures for
amending any principle, rule or procedure. The constitution in the narrow
sense is the cluster of supreme or essential principles, rules and procedures
to which other laws, institutions and governing authorities within the
association are subject. In the broader sense constitution includes the
1
2
3
This third response is the public philosophy set out in Volume I, Chapter 1.
Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns.
The exchange between Habermas and Rawls was first published in The Journal of Philosophy 92(3),
1995. Both authors republished their contributions with minor changes in collections with other works
that help to explain the more technical terms of the debate: Habermas, Reconciliation Through the
Public Use of Reason, in The Inclusion of the Other, and Rawls, Reply to Habermas, in Political
Liberalism. My discussion of these two principles draws on Habermas and Rawls, but also on an
important case by the Supreme Court of Canada in which the courts understanding of these two
principles of legitimacy is explicated and then applied to the hypothetical case of the secession of a
province from the Canadian federation, Supreme Court of Canada, Reference re the Secession of Quebec,
pp. 1472, particularly 3282. For my interpretation of the Reference case as an application of these
two principles of legitimacy, subdivided into four principles for the particular context, see Volume I,
Chapter 6. My formulation of the principle of constitutionalism in this paragraph follows the Supreme
Court closely. The Supreme Court distinguishes between constitutionalism and the rule of law (708)
but, like Habermas and Rawls, also uses constitutionalism in the broad sense to cover both (32).
The unfreedom of the moderns
93
rule of law the system of laws, rules, norms, conventions and procedures
that govern the actions of all those subject to it.
The principle of democracy (or popular sovereignty) requires that,
although the people or peoples who constitute a political association are
subject to the constitutional system, they, or their entrusted representatives, must also impose the general system on themselves in order to be
sovereign and free, and thus for the association to be democratically
legitimate. The sovereign people or peoples impose the constitutional
system on themselves by means of having a say over the principles, rules
and procedures through the exchange of public reasons in democratic
practices of deliberation, either directly or indirectly through their representatives (in so far as they are trustworthy, accountable and revocable,
and the deliberations are public). Such public acts usually occur in a
piecemeal fashion by taking up some subset of the principles, rules and
procedures of the system. These democratic practices of deliberation are
themselves rule-governed (to be constitutionally legitimate), but the rules
must also be open to democratic amendment (to be democratically
legitimate).4
Habermas and Rawls follow Constant in calling the democratic principle the freedom of the ancients. As Habermas writes, it is the political
rights of participation and communication that make possible the citizens exercise of self-determination. I will call the freedom of popular
sovereignty expressed by the principle of democracy democratic freedom, rather than ancient freedom, because it is the rule of the people.
If the rules by which the demos are governed are imposed by someone
else, and even if they have a range of freedoms within this other-imposed
regime, they are not self-governing, self-determining or sovereign, and
are thus unfree. To be free democratically is not only to be able to
participate in various ways in accordance with the principles, rules and
procedures of the constitutional system, as important as this is, but also,
and crucially, always to be able to take one step back, dissent and call
4
In some versions of the democratic principle, it is insufficient to have a say, directly or indirectly. It is
also necessary to have a hand in the exercise of power over which one has a say: that is, to exercise
public power together, rather than delegating it. I take this up in Chapter 9, this volume. I will take it
as sufficient that the people or peoples of the association exercise public reasons together over public
powers in negotiations that are tied to implementation. Although there is widespread agreement on
these two principles of legitimation, there is disagreement on their formulation. Habermas formulates
the principle of democracy in terms of two principles (D and U) and Rawls in terms of four stages
of the exchange of public reasons. Habermas, Discourse Ethics; and Rawls, Reply to Habermas, in
Political Liberalism, pp. 396406. The Supreme Court of Canada prefers to work out case-specific
formulations of the two principles.
94
into question the principles, rules or procedures by which one is governed and to enter into (rule-governed) deliberations over them, or
usually over a subset of them, with those who govern. Habermas and
Rawls also agree with Constant in holding that a modern constitutional
democracy strives to combine this democratic or political freedom with
the freedom of the moderns: in Habermas formulation, the liberty of
belief and conscience, the protection of life, personal liberty, and property in sum, the core of subjective private rights. These two types of
freedom are often referred to as public autonomy and private
autonomy respectively.5
In summary, a political association is legitimate if and only if it is equally
constitutional and democratic: that is, the combination of constitutional
democracy and democratic constitutionalism. The two principles are the
basic law implicit in modern constitutions.
Critical discussion over the last decade has brought to our attention six
features of these two norms of legitimation.
(1) The feature that has received the most attention is their critical and
abstract character. They are critical and abstract in the sense that they are not
agreed to and applied directly in particular cases. Rather, they are background
critical principles of judgment that orient participants in their critical discussion and contestation of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a practice of
governance. To put this another way, participants in political struggles
bring very different and often conflicting traditions of interpretation, conceptions and weightings of constitutional and democratic considerations to
bear on a case at hand. What is shared by neo-liberal democrats, social
democrats, socialist democrats, feminist democrats, eco-democrats, pluralist
democrats, communitarian democrats, agonistic democrats and cosmopolitan democrats is an abstract and critical democratic-constitutional orientation to the systems of cooperation in which they find themselves (see
feature 3). They share, so to speak, a mode of problematisation of their
political identity. Although the principles are abstract in this sense,
5
Habermas, Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason, in The Inclusion of the Other, pp. 689,
and compare Rawls, Reply to Habermas, in Political Liberalism, p. 396. Constant sometimes includes
public autonomy or political liberty, the rights of democratic participation in representative democracies, within the freedoms of the moderns (pp. 31011), whereas at other times he separates the two in
a manner similar to Habermas and Rawls and says they have to be combined (pp. 3238). In addition,
Habermas often equates the principle of constitutionalism with the freedom of the moderns on the
assumption that the role of a modern constitution is to protect subjective rights or private autonomy.
Although this is clearly one role of a modern constitution and it is often interpreted as the role, I, like
Rawls and the Supreme Court of Canada, see it as one role among several and so will not equate the
protection of the rights of private autonomy with the principle of constitutionalism.
95
they are not idle. They are norms immanent in the practices of political
cooperation of late modernity, and thus they are the orientation of critical
self-awareness and self-formation that one takes on in virtue of being a
participant in these practices (see feature 6).6
(2) The two principles are equiprimordial. They are equally basic. If the
principle of constitutionalism gains priority over the principle of democracy, so the constitution is the foundation of democratic rights and institutions but is not itself subject to democratic deliberation, then the association
is illegitimate. Politics is said to be reduced to juridification and to suffer a
democratic deficit, as, for example, in the European Union or in forms of
liberalism that place the constitution prior to and independent of the
practices of democratic dispute and amendment. If, conversely, the democratic principle gains priority, then the association is said to be illegitimate
because it is a tyranny of the majority, without rules and procedures, or the
licentious experience of empty willing.7
(3) Coordination of the two principles involves an irreducible element of
reasonable disagreement. There will always be disagreement among judges,
representatives and citizens over the interpretation, procedures, application,
institutionalisation and review in accordance with the orienting principles
of constitutionalism and democracy in any instance; disagreements for
which there will be good but non-decisive reasons on each side. This is
6
The immanence of the two principles in modern political culture, the plurality of rival yet reasonable
traditions of interpretation and application of the principles, and the resulting critical orientation of
participants are central to the approaches of Rawls and Habermas and to the contemporary theorists of
other democratic-constitutional traditions mentioned in the text. Of course, it is possible to call into
question this entire orientation from some other perspective. However, it is interesting to note, as
Hegel did, how many of the attempts to do so are either caught up in the two principles in one way or
another, and so involve a performative contradiction (as Habermas argues), or else border on idle
speculation. For Hegels argument, see Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegels Social Theory:
Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
See Habermas, Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Freedom, in The Inclusion of the Other,
pp. 6773; and Rawls, Reply to Habermas, in Political Liberalism, pp. 40921. In Reconciliation,
Habermas objected that Rawls subordinated the principle of popular sovereignty to the principle of the
rule of law, as liberal democrats often do. Rawls replied that his political liberalism, in which the
legitimacy of the basic structure of a political association rests on the exchange of public reasons among
free and equal citizens, treats the two principles equally (see especially p. 407 and his reference to Frank
Michelman: I take American constitutionalism to rest on two premises regarding political freedom:
first, that the American people are politically free insomuch as they are governed by themselves
collectively, and second, that the American people are politically free in that they are governed by laws
rather than men I take them to be premises whose problematic relation to each other, and therefore
whose meaning, are subject to an endless contestation.). Rawls clarifies this further in The Idea of
Public Reason Revisited, in The Law of Peoples with the Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999). Habermas explores the co-equal status of the two principles further in
On the Internal Relation Between the Rule of Law and Democracy. (Sir Isaiah Berlin is an example of a
liberal who grants priority, and sometimes exclusivity, to the principle of constitutionalism.)
96
obviously true in non-ideal circumstances of real-world politics, but it is

also true in ideal theory, as Jeremy Waldron among others has argued.
Reasonable disagreement and thus dissent are inevitable and go all the way
down in theory and practice (including over the reasonable). There thus
will be democratic agreement and disagreement not only within the rules of
law but also over the rules of law. This feature also explains why there are
many rival conceptions and traditions of interpretation of democracy and
constitutionalism (mentioned under feature 1).8
This third feature is called the agonistic dimension of constitutional
democracy because it entails that no rule of law, procedure or agreement is
permanently insulated from disputation in practice in an open society. The
democratic practices of disputation and contestation that were previously
assumed to rest on permanent constitutional arrangements, to which the
people were supposed to have agreed once and for all, are now seen to apply
to those arrangements as well, and thus agonism (the Greek word for
contest) is seen to be a defining feature of democratic constitutionalism, one
that partly explains and also reinforces the co-equal status of the two
principles.9
(4) The next feature follows from the first three. Any democratic and
constitutional political association, from a city to a multilayered global order,
that seeks to legitimate its arrangements under these two co-equal principles
will be a negotiated constitutional order or a continuously conciliated
order. The constitution or the principles justifying it cannot be seen as a
8
See Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 102
6; and The Dignity of Legislation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1534. Waldron
argues that Rawls is committed to the earlier view that agreement is possible on constitutional essentials,
but it is not clear that he is in Political Liberalism, pp. 548 and The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,
where he suggests that there will always be a family of rival, reasonable political conceptions of justice.
Habermas appears to continue to hold that there could be agreement on both the democratic procedures
for testing a norm of action-coordination (a rule of law) and a proposed norm within the democratic
procedures, in principle at least. However, it is not clear how we are to take these two types of consensus,
given their ideal and quasi-transcendental status. If they are simply critical, rather than regulative, ideals
(that is, ideals that are themselves open to criticism from another standpoint, and so always subject to the
democratic exchange of reasons), then it is not clear that they are incompatible with the view that
disagreement goes all the way down, over questions of the right as well as the good. This is, after all, the
status of the two legitimacy principles as well, and it is the way his approach has been interpreted by some
of his followers, such as Simone Chambers and Seyla Benhabib.
For the agonistic dimensions of constitutional democracy, see Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the
Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Connolly, The Ethos of
Pluralization; John Gray, Enlightenments Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age
(London: 1995); and Chantal Mouffe, For an Agonistic Model of Democracy, in The Democratic
Paradox (London: Verso, 2000). Mouffe argues that the disagreement and agonism result from the
irreconcilability of the logics of the two fundamental principles of constitutionalism and democracy
(pp. 135).
97
permanent foundation or framework which underlies democratic debate and

legislation. They must be reciprocally subject to legitimation through practices of the democratic exchange of reasons by those subject to them over
time. No sooner is a constitutional principle, rule or law laid down as the basis
of democratic institutions, then it is itself open in principle to democratic
challenge, deliberation and amendment. No particular negotiation and resolution will be definitive because there will always be the possibility of
reasonable disagreement. Furthermore, particular negotiations will proceed
in accord with some principles, rules and procedures whose constitutional
legitimacy are not questioned in the course of the negotiations, on pain of
infinite regress, but which must be open to democratic review in the future in
order to be democratically legitimate.
In the earlier modern period, it was assumed that there was some
definitive ordering of legitimate political associations towards which democratisation and constitutionalisation were tending. Consequently, the role
of political philosophy was seen as working towards the definitive theory of
justice or the definitive democratic procedures of legitimation in which
citizens themselves could reach final agreements on the just ordering of their
association. Now, as the result of two hundred years of constitution making
and remaking, and of discussions of rival and changing theories of democratic-constitutional justice, we have a better understanding of how the two
principles of legitimation work together in this open-ended and nondefinitive manner. Democratic constitutionalism is an activity rather than
an end-state. Its legitimacy does not rest on its approximation to some ideal
consensus, but rather on the mutual relationship between the prevailing
rules of law and the democratic and judicial practices of on-going disagreement, negotiation, amendment, implementation and review.10
The Supreme Court of Canada illustrates this feature in the Reference re
the Secession of Quebec. While the clear and procedurally valid expression of
the will of the majority of a member of a constitutional association for
constitutional change cannot of itself effect that constitutional change
unilaterally (such as secession of a province), it does constitute the exercise
of the right to initiate constitutional change (the democratic principle) and
10
The negotiated, rather than foundational character of democratic constitutionalism is the central
theme of the Supreme Court of Canada, Reference re the Secession of Quebec, 6678. I have tried to
show that reasonable disagreement and negotiation stem in part from the diversity of the members of
contemporary constitutional associations and the complex relations among them, in Volume I,
Chapter 6. Jo Shaw discusses constitutionalism in the EU in a similar manner in Postnational
Constitutionalism, and Relating Constitutionalism and Flexibility in the EU, in Constitutional
Change in the EU: From Uniformity to Flexibility?, eds. Grinne de Brca and Joanne Scott (Oxford:
Hart, 2000).
98
thus does initiate constitutional negotiations over that change. The other
members have a reciprocal constitutional duty to negotiate in good faith,
but the negotiations must proceed in accord with the protection of individual rights, minority rights, the principle of federalism and so on (the
constitutional principle).11
(5) The principles of constitutionalism and democracy are modified
significantly by political globalisation. This is the most difficult feature to
articulate briefly. In an earlier period it was thought that the sovereign
people could act in a uniform and united way in the exercise of their public
autonomy (for example, in a constituent assembly or civil society), over
the constitution of one central representative government, and in a selfcontained nation-state. These three assumptions were shared by both the
Lockean and Rousseauian traditions. They are now seen to be untenable.
Firstly, the people are diverse and dispersed: they exercise their democratic
freedom in a multiplicity of sites. Secondly, the functions of government are
not located in or controlled by a set of traditional representative institutions
and their constitutional framework. There are as many practices of governance as there are systems or practices of action coordination across the
public, private and voluntary spheres, and in which individuals and groups
have the right to have a say over the way their conduct is governed. This
dispersion of practices of governance and of democratic freedom (often
distantly related to the traditional institutions of representative government
and the rule of law) is commonly called governance without government
or the spread of governmentality. Thirdly, the diversification of peoples
and governance is not contained within Westphalian, independent nationstates. The institutions and activities of constitutional democracies are
increasingly a mixture of constitutional representative governments in
nation-states and newer, overlapping and multilayered networks of governance that stretch from the local and regional through the national and
federal to the supranational and global.12
11
12
Supreme Court of Canada, Reference re the Secession of Quebec, 8394 (see Volume I, Chapter 6). We
can also see that the earlier understanding of constitutional democracy rests on the unrealisable
assumption that the people could be, simultaneously, sovereign over the constitution (the democratic
principle) and subject to it (the constitutional principle). Foucault argues that this sovereign and
subject double was one of the constitutive and unresolvable tensions of modern thought and practice
in The Order of Things, pp. 31228. The late-modern or post-modern negotiated understanding of
democracy and constitutionalism simply recognises that they cannot be resolved in any definitive way,
thereby dissolving rather than overcoming the aporia, as Foucault suggests.
The decentring of public autonomy and loci of governance is a central concern of Habermas in
Between Facts and Norms. For an extension of his approach to global politics, see Linklater, The
Transformation of Political Community. A slightly different view of these three global changes, called
cosmopolitan democracy, is presented by David Held and his associates, summarised in Held,
99
This is not to say that every practice of governance is legitimate only if

it operates in accordance with the principles of constitutionalism and
democracy. Many forms of governance are often non-constitutional and
non-democratic, coordinating the activity of the participants without their
direct say: markets, property systems, administrative bureaucracies, families, corporations and regulatory regimes. However, it does mean that if a
system of cooperation is not organised democratically and constitutionally,
then it requires a public justification that can be made good to the people
who are subject to it and its effects (justifications such as efficiency, competency, utility, a distinction between public and private tradition, and so
on). And these justifications, for the reasons discussed under feature 3, must
always be open to democratic disagreement and deliberation (by the types of
citizen mentioned under feature 1).13
(6) The final feature is the pragmatic relationship of the principles of
constitutionalism and democracy to practices of citizenisation. Members of
constitutional democracies become citizens not only in virtue of a (amenable) set of constitutionally guaranteed rights and duties enabling them to
participate in the institutions of their association. They also acquire their
identity as citizens a form of both self-awareness and self-formation in
virtue of exercising these rights: of participating in democratic-constitutional
institutions and, more importantly, participating in the array of practices of
deliberation over the existing institutions. Participation in these variegated
activities (negotiations over the latest health and equity policy in the workplace, engagement in public debate over legal and political change, party
politics and enacting legislation, interest groups, social movements, taking a
law to court, deliberations over and voting in constitutional referendums, civil
disobedience, and, at the extreme, the Lockean activity of overthrowing an
unjust government and setting up a new one) creates the type of orientation
mentioned in feature 1. A participant comes to acquire the identity of a citizen
of a constitutional democracy; one who is aware that its institutions are
13
Democracy and Globalization. The phrase governance without government comes from Roseneau,
Governance and Democracy in a Globalizing World. The term governmentality comes from Michel
Foucault and his students: see Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Dean, Governmentality. See the comprehensive
synopsis of research in this area prepared by Neil Walker, The Idea of Constitutional Pluralism,
Modern Law Review 65(3), 2002: 31759. I have discussed some of these changes in Strange Multiplicity.
The differences among the major schools of constitutional democracy (socialist, neo-liberal, ecological, etc.) consist in disagreements over the reasonableness of these justifications for shielding
certain areas of contemporary societies from the exercise of public autonomy, standardly in the name
of private autonomy. On the general requirement of a discursive justification that can be made good
to all those affected, see Rainer Forst, Towards a Critical Theory of Transnational Justice,
Metaphilosophy 32(12), 2001: 16079.
100
legitimate to the extent that they stand the test of the principles of constitutionalism and democracy and who has formed the abilities of putting them to
the test through practices of deliberation.
Participation in these practices of reason-exchanging citizenisation also
confers legitimacy on the two principles and on the political association in
which the democratic deliberation takes place, even though disputation is
over the legitimacy of the association and disagreement is permanent.
Citizens develop a sense of identification with the principles and the
association to which they are applied not because a consensus is reached,
or is on the horizon, but precisely because they become aware that, despite
its current imperfections and injustices, the association is nonetheless not
closed but open to this form of democratic freedom. It is a free association.
This legitimacy-conferring aspect of citizen participation generates the
unique kind of solidarity characteristic of constitutional democracies in
the face of disagreement, diversity and negotiation.14
Let this stand as an incomplete and no doubt controversial summary of
the recent critical discussion of conditions of legitimacy of contemporary
constitutional democracies undergoing rapid change. The next section
turns to three general trends in practice that have played a part in stimulating the critical discussion and so the elaboration of the six features. These
are trends that appear illegitimate in the light of the principle of democracy.
This sets the stage for the third and fourth sections, which attempt to
show how the discussion of the six features has developed in three main
phases in response to these trends. Elucidating the discussion in this
reciprocal way to practice provides the equipment for a more appropriate
critical approach to the study of constitutional democracies.15
2 three illegitimate trends in comparison
to the principle of democracy
Three general trends in constitutional-democratic practice can be seen as
illegitimate relative to the basic equality of the principles of constitutionalism
14
15
I am indebted to Anthony Laden, who, in a work inspired by Rawls, has rebuilt liberal political
philosophy in response to the critical discussions of these six features, especially the last. See Laden,
Reasonably Radical. For a different approach to identity formation in contemporary constitutional
democracies, see Volume I, Chapter 5.
These three constitutional trends are not the only trends that have stimulated reflection on constitutional and democratic legitimacy. They are, however, three trends that have been seen to be of
questionable legitimacy under the principle of democracy, and so have helped to stimulate discussion
of that principle and its relevance today. They may violate the principle of constitutionalism as well,
but this important question must be set aside for now.
101
and democracy. These trends have become the sites of legal and political
struggles in practice and critical reflection in theory.
The first trend is the processes of global juridification that are accompanying the economic processes of the globalisation of capital. The proliferation of hundreds of global regulatory regimes, such as NAFTA and the
WTO, constitutes complex processes of global constitutionalisation. These
constitutions lay down the basic rights and duties of individuals, peoples,
states and private corporations that provide the conditions for the expansion
of global, corporate capitalism. These constitutional regimes have the
capacity to override domestic and national constitutions, forcing them to
conform, and to free the economy from the democratic control of existing
nation-states.
In view of the principle of democracy, this trend is of questionable
legitimacy for two reasons. Firstly, the regimes of juridification do not
establish new or renewed local and global representative democratic institutions to govern the economic processes for which they provide the
constitutional underpinning. Even emerging global human rights regimes
tend to favour the rights of private autonomy over public autonomy. This is
unlike the historical development of nation-states and national economies,
in which the constitutionalisation of market relations was confronted with
the representative democratisation of the basic social and economic structure of these political associations, at least to some extent. Supranational and
global regulatory regimes are non-democratic and often anti-democratic.
Secondly, and more fundamentally, the discussion, design, establishment
and monitoring of these constitutional regimes, including human rights
regimes, do not pass through and are not subject to the democratic deliberation of the humans who are subject to them. This is a trend, therefore, in
which a specific type of constitutionalism has gained priority, and perhaps
exclusivity, over the principle of democracy. It is illegitimate because it
violates the equality condition (feature 2) and, as a domino effect, the four
following features.16
The second trend is the devolution and dispersion of political power and
forms of political association. This refers to the proliferation of nations,
16
In general, see Held, et al., Global Transformations, pp. 3286, 149234. For a detailed legal analysis of
one economic constitution, see Steven Shrybman, The World Trade Organization: A Citizens Guide,
2nd edition (Toronto: James Larimer, 2001). In this regard note also that the emerging rights regimes
in the EU neither pass through democratic deliberation nor establish practices of democratic
deliberation over rights. See Richard Bellamy, The Right to Have Rights: Citizen Practice and the
Political Constitution of the European Union, in Citizenship and Governance in the European Union,
eds. Richard Bellamy and Alex Warleigh (London: Continuum, 2002).
102
states and city-states since the beginning of political decolonisation in the

1960s; the dismantling and devolution of powers within federal states such
as India, Canada and the European Union to sub-units under the pressures
of the politics of recognition (multinationalism, multiculturalism and
regionalism); the emergence of multilayered functional governance locally
and globally; and the contracting-out of dispute resolution to ad hoc nodes
with network-like relations to the more traditional institutions of representative democracy. On the one hand, this global trend towards legal and
political pluralism, federalism and subsidiarity can be seen as the expansion
of opportunities for the exercise of democratic freedoms. On the other, it is
also a trend towards weaker political units. The new states, autonomous
units within complex federations, and global political networks tend to be
weak relative to the power of transnational corporations and their complementary regulatory regimes, such as the World Bank.17
Except for the United States and a few other G8 states, political units
often lack the power to enforce democratic procedures and outcomes that
challenge global corporations and their ability to move elsewhere. The result
is that the relatively weak polities become trapped in a race to the bottom.
They reduce constitutional democracy to elections and the security and
private autonomy required for the expansion of global capitalism in order to
attract the economic development they require to remain solvent. In the
poorest and weakest states even the basic democratic rights of assembly,
association and free speech are curtailed and sweat-shop work conditions
imposed. These political associations are unable to enforce the local selfdetermination, survival of linguistic and cultural diversity, economic selfreliance, self-determination or environmental safeguards they were set up
to protect and promote. The trend to devolution and dispersion thus
tends, to a significant degree, to support rather than challenge the trend
towards global juridification and so is of questionable legitimacy for the
same reason.18
The third trend is the decline of democratic deliberation and decisionmaking within the traditional institutions of representative nation-states.
17
18
Decentralisation in Canada, for example, finds support from those in favour of local democratic
control on the one hand, and from the major lobby groups for large corporations on the other. For an
introduction to the complexities of this second trend in relation to democracy and constitutionalism,
see Gagnon and Tully, eds., Multinational Democracies; and Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman,
eds., Citizenship in Diverse Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Richard Barnett and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order
(New York: Simon and Shuster, 1994); William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of
Global Capitalism (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1997); Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: A
Critique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); Held, Democracy and the Global Order, pp. 23966.
103
The policies and decisions of representative bodies are increasingly the

outcome of unaccountable ministries on the one hand, and a small circle
of representatives elected through non-deliberative advertising campaigns
and controlled by wealthy lobbying interests and media corporations on the
other. Constitutional reform tends to be crafted by unelected experts and
ratified by referendums subject to mass advertising and spectacles rather
than democratic deliberation. Political powers are abjured to the market
or passed to global regulatory regimes by small groups of unelected and
unaccountable negotiators in private meetings whose self-consciousness
has been shaped by careers in ministries or large corporations, not in
practices of citizenisation. Citizen participation decreases and democratic
apathy and malaise increases. Once again, this trend violates the principle of
democracy, by diminishing the capacities and opportunities for democratic
freedom.19
Finally, these three trends work together to insulate the growing global
social and economic inequalities from public democratic discussion and
reform. The only way to struggle effectively against these enormous inequalities in wealth and wellbeing is through the exercise of democratic freedoms
in the most effective forums and also, by these means, to fight for formal
democratic freedoms for the worst-off (who can then exercise them as they
see fit). Yet, the trends make this difficult in the best circumstances (where
democratic freedoms are constitutionalised) and an offence punished by
exclusion, disappearance or death in the worst (where democratic rights
cannot even be discussed). As a result, the unchecked inequalities further
erode the very basic prerequisites of diet, health, knowledge and organisation necessary to exercise democratic freedom for an increasing percentage
of the worlds population, even though their condition is the direct effect of
a global constitutional system of property rights over which they, by the
principle of democracy, should have a right to a say.20
19
20
Rawls, Reply to Habermas, in Political Liberalism, p. 407 (the present system woefully fails in public
financing for political elections, leading to a grave imbalance in fair political liberties; it allows a widely
disparate distribution of income and wealth that seriously undermines fair opportunities in education
and employment, all of which undermine economic and social equality); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling
Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Touchstone, 2000); Henry
Milner, Civic Literacy in Comparative Context, Policy Matters 2(2), 2001: 139; Guy Debord, Society
of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
Thomas Pogge, Priorities of Global Justice, Metaphilosophy 32(12), 2001: 624; Noam Chomsky,
Socioeconomic Sovereignty, in Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 2000); Falk, Predatory Globalization, pp. 15366.
104
This is a negotiated constitutional order, to be sure, but it is negotiated

by powerful, non-democratic actors, not by the democratic citizens and
representatives, as feature four requires for legitimacy.
3 critical discussion of the two principles
in the light of the three trends
What can be learned from the experience described in the previous two
sections? This section and the next aim to answer the question. The answer
is evaluative and constructive: to elucidate the critical discussion summarised
in section 1 in relation to the three trends of section 2 with the aim of
proposing guidelines for the future critical understanding and study of
constitutionalism and democracy in the changed circumstances of the
twenty-first century. The discussion of the two principles of legitimacy is
divided into three types of response to the constitutional changes in practice.
The first two types of response are analysed in this section and the third in
section 4.
The first response has been to accept these trends, either in an attitude of
defence and celebration or of resignation and melancholy. The most
influential celebratory side of this first response is neo-liberalism, but certain
reformulations of social democracy, such as the third way, have also been
influential. Here the coordination and governance of human interaction and
cooperation by global markets and regulatory regimes, behind the backs of
the impotent participants, is said to be inevitable and without alternative. In
any case, it is far too complex and fragile for the subjects to have a democratic
voice over the processes that govern them without introducing destabilising
incompetence and inefficiency, which, after all, given the levels of apathy, no
one wants. Rather, the demands of democratic-constitutional legitimacy are
now met in the space of lifestyle politics opened up and made possible by
globalisation and juridification. One may now turn ones individual or
collective life into a democratic enterprise; deliberating about, taking on
and revising a wide range of careers, work relationships, consumption patterns, lifestyles, identities and voluntary associations around gender, cultures,
languages, hybridity and the environment, and being free to change these
as one chooses. Citizens, individually and in groups, enjoy the market freedoms of the moderns, especially of mobility, consumption and change, and
are free to invent themselves as they move from role to role, and thus to live
life like an actor, as Nietzsche predicted. Finally, while it is acknowledged that
these modern freedoms are not yet available to the majority of the worlds
population, these developing peoples are nevertheless said to be, in virtue of
105
being brought into global markets and regulation, on the trajectory of

democratisation (a redescriptive term that eliminates the principle of
democracy).21
The other side of this first type of response is one of resignation, rather
than celebration, in the face of global processes that are said to be beyond
democratic-constitutional control. The reason for this melancholy attitude
is that the modern freedom of lifestyle politics is seen as superficial at best.
Given the enormous global inequalities, the freedom of consuming lifestyles
is available only to the few, and even for this elite the range of options is
narrow and shallow. The vast majority of the world are condemned at best
to watch and try to imitate the rich and famous minority in a kind of global
synopticon and, at worst, to work in sweat shops to produce the commodities the minority consume.22 Moreover, while all those involved in lifestyle
politics are free in a restricted sense, the diverse identities, modes of conduct
and choices by which they construct and reconstruct themselves in their
private autonomy are subject to new and diffuse forms of non-democratic
modes of governance without government or governmentality that lack
immanent practices of democratic freedom. In Michel Foucaults famous
phrase, they are governed through their modern freedoms. As regimes of
governmentality proliferate globally, they tend to bring more areas of life
under their governance (the phenomenon of biopower), coordinating
lifestyles in the North and local participation in the South with the three
trends of the previous section. And, on one speculative account, consitutionalism and popular sovereignty are sublimated into modalities of a global
empire of governmentality.23
21
22
23
Among the celebrators, Anthony Giddens is widely seen as one of the most sophisticated proponents
of this response and defender of it against its critics. See Anthony Giddens, The Third Way and Its
Critics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). For a range of views of celebration and resignation, see David
Held and Anthony McGrew, eds., The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the
Globalization Debate, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). For Nietzsches prediction and
the concerns he had regarding the possibility of acting together for a future good, see Paul Patton,
Nietzsche and the Problem of the Actor, in Why Nietzsche Still?, ed. Alan Schrift (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).
Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Alex
Callinicos, Against the Third Way: An Anti-Capitalist Critique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). For a
range of voices of resignation, see Held and McGrew, eds., The Global Transformations Reader.
For the roles of governmentality and biopower, see note 12 above, especially the indispensable work
by Nikolas Rose, and for their global reach, in addition to James Roseneau, see Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 342, 219350. Hardt
and Negri are not resigned to these processes but argue that they create the possibility of democratic
action (see below). For the co-optation of local participation and local knowledge in developing
countries into global governance and Western development, see Peter Traintafillou and Mikkel
Risbjerg Nielson, Policing Empowerment: The Making of Capable Subjects, History of the Human
Sciences 14(2), 2001: 6386.
106
Both the second and third types of response are critical of the three trends
and of the celebratory and melancholy justifications of them. They reassert
the co-equal importance of the principle of democracy and propose ways in
which practices of democratic deliberation can be adapted to, and made
good in, these circumstances. It is this critical research in North America
and Europe that has spearheaded the discussion and elaboration of the two
principles and six features summarised in section 1. The major difference
between these critical responses is that the third response (the second critical
response) is less abstract than the second and more closely and reciprocally
related to practice. The second response is critical and theoretical whereas
the third response is critical and practical.24
Both the second and the third responses can be characterised by three
contrasts with the first response above. (i) To deliberate alone or in a private
group as opposed to in public with fellow citizens; (ii) to deliberate about
lifestyle politics as opposed to matters of common concern and public goods;
and (iii) to deliberate in order to act within relations of governance over which
one has no say as opposed to deliberating to act together in exercising political
power over those relations. All this is not freedom but only a certain form of
private freedom. It is the disappearance of democratic freedom, standardly
on the presumption that present neo-liberal constitutional democracy is the
just and definitive end of political history, requiring only global diffusion and
internal adjustments. In contrast to this complacent orthodoxy, the proponents of the two critical responses hold that democratic freedom makes its
appearance only when subjects take up the task of acting as citizens in the
three contrastive ways above. That is, they act in public with fellow citizens,
about matters of common concern and public goods, and they exercise
political power in and over the given relations of governance.
The second response is associated with Habermas and Rawls and the
more theoretical elaboration of deliberative democracy and democratic
constitutionalism. According to Habermas, the politics of Western societies
has lost its orientation and self-confidence. The triumphant neo-liberal
parties have no interest in bringing these trends under democratic control,
and they have no sensibility for the human resource that is most endangered, the social solidarity preserved in legal structures and in continual
need of continual regeneration. Consequently, behind the hackneyed
rhetoric, timidity reigns. Notwithstanding this dominant discourse, he
claims there is an underlying unrest for democratic self-determination:
24
For the differences between these two Enlightenment traditions of legal and political philosophy, see
107
the unrest has a still deeper source, namely, the sense that the rule of law cannot
be had or maintained without radical democracy. In the final analysis, private legal
subjects cannot come to enjoy equal individual liberties if they do not themselves, in
the common exercise of their political autonomy, achieve clarity about justified
interests and standards. They themselves must agree on the relevant aspects under
which equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally.
His philosophical task, accordingly, is to turn his hunch of an unrest for

democratic freedom into a theoretical insight.25
Similarly for Rawls, in conditions of injustice reasonable citizens will
strive to exercise their democratic freedom. When Habermas claimed that
Rawls accepts the subordination of the principle of democracy to the
principle of consitutionalism, Rawls replied:
[I]t is not clear what is meant by [Habermas] saying that citizens in a just society
cannot reignite the radical democratic embers of the original position in civic life.
We are bound to ask: Why not? For we have seen above in considering the four stage
sequence that citizens continually discuss questions of political principles and social
policy. Moreover, we may assume that any actual society is more or less unjust
usually gravely so and such debates are all the more necessary. No (human) theory
could possibly anticipate all the requisite considerations bearing on these problems
under existing circumstances, nor could the needed reforms have already been
foreseen for improving present arrangements. The ideal of a just constitution is
always something to be worked towards. [W]henever the constitution and laws are in
various ways unjust and imperfect, citizens with reason strive to become more
[publicly] autonomous by doing what, in their historical and social circumstances,
can be reasonably and rationally seen to advance their full autonomy.26
The primary focus of the second response has been to clarify the two
principles of legitimacy and their co-equality, the practices of deliberation
and the exchange of public reasons among free, equal and diverse citizens,
the critical and abstract character of the two principles, the role of the courts
in balancing the principles and exemplifying the exchange of public reasons,
and how practices of citizen deliberation might be engendered in practice. It
has been responsible for getting various approaches of deliberative democracy and cosmopolitan democracy on the research agenda and clarifying the
first two features of the principles.
In its early phase (as was briefly introduced in section 1), this response
tended to assume that the exercise of public autonomy within and over the
25
26
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. xlii.

Rawls, Reply to Habermas, in Political Liberalism, pp. 4012. Even if a constitution were perfect,
Rawls stresses (following Rousseau), the exercise of public autonomy would be necessary for
legitimation and the creation of citizens (pp. 4023).
108
rules of constitutionalism is oriented towards a definitive consensus or

agreement; the exchange of public reasons applies only or primarily to
constitutional essentials and the basic structure of constitutional democracy; and democratic deliberation takes place within self-contained nationstates. Correspondingly, the role of political philosophy was assumed to be
to develop a comprehensive theory of justice or of procedures of public
reasoning within which citizens themselves could reach agreement on
definitive constitutional principles.
These assumptions were called into question and shown to be untenable
by reflection on practice and by the sorts of considerations that led to the
last three features discussed in section 1. But they were also undermined by
reflection on the principle of democracy itself. If citizens are to be free, then
the procedures by which they deliberate, the reasons they accept as public
reasons and the practices of governance they are permitted to test by
these democratic means must not be imposed from the outside (that is,
legislated by theoretical reason or a constitution beyond amendment), but
must themselves be open to deliberation and amendment en passant (not all
at once) in the course of the exchange of reasons as the equality of the
principle of democracy requires. The entire exercise of democratic freedom
in relation to the existing rule of law must be intersubjective and openended practical reasoning.
4 the third response: a critical and practical
approach
This transition to the equality of democratic practices relative to the
principles, rules and procedures of constitutionalism, which marks the
transition to the third response, also transformed the role of political and
legal philosophy. The role of philosophy could no longer be to reflect on
practices of democratic deliberation from the allegedly higher-order perspective of theoretical reason and to legislate the procedures and limits of
public reasons from outside the democratic exchange of reasons: that is, it
should be political not metaphysical.27 When philosophers and theorists
work on the best procedures for democratic deliberation and what count as
27
The phrase comes from John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical, in Collected
Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). As I mentioned in note 8, it is a matter of
debate whether Rawls and Habermas accepted the full force of these arguments, and thus if their later
work should be seen as making the transition to the third stage. For a sample of deliberative
democracy representative of the second response, see James Bohman and William Rehg, eds.,
Deliberative Democracy: Essay on Reason and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
109
public reasons, and when they propose their rival conceptions of justice,
they are on a level playing field with fellow citizens, representatives and
judges. They are dialogue partners with them. They start from and exercise
the same types of reflective practical reasoning as other participants, aiming
to bring critical clarification to existing or possible practices of deliberation
by presenting their (contestable) reasons to their fellow citizens, rather than
prescribing the bounds of reason to them. They too learn to exchange
practical reasons about this matter through practice.28
This transition to a critical and practice-oriented philosophy is the first
and defining characteristic of the third response. These scholars have built
on the earlier work of the second response, exposed its shortcomings and
elaborated features 3 to 6. They have shifted from an abstract and prescriptive stance to a contextual and dialogical approach to the democratic
practices in which citizens come to acquire the abilities to exchange public
reasons in the complex circumstances of our times. This is, so to speak, a
transition from the more metaphysical orientation of the Kantian and
neo-Kantian Enlightenment to the practical orientation of the rival
Enlightenment of Rousseau, Constant, Hegel, Marx, Dewey and
Foucault, who insisted that philosophical inquiry be reciprocally related
to practice through mutually enlightening dialogues and aimed at enhancing democratic freedom.29
28
29
This transition to seeing political philosophy as a species of practical philosophy is often associated
with the work of Richard Rorty and especially his article, The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy, in
Philosophical Papers, Vol. I, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), without accepting the particular inferences he draws from it, and the work of Charles Taylor,
Philosophical Arguments. For this transition and Rortys contribution, see Volume I, Chapter 4; and
Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism, Social Democracy and Politics, in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues,
eds. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). For an account of the
transition and its implications for liberal political philosophy, see Laden, Reasonably Radical, pp. 1416.
For an agonistic account, see Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, pp. 60107. For a broader historical
account of this way of thinking about constitutional democracy, see Tully, Strange Multiplicity, pp. 103
16, 20912, and Volume I.
For a more detailed and internal account of this transition, to which I am indebted, see James
Bohman, The Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy, Journal of Political Philosophy 6(4), 1998:
399423; and John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For the case for seeing this transition in terms of Rousseau
and Hegel, see Laden, Reasonably Radical, pp. 173. For the relevance of Dewey, see Matthew
Festenstein, Inquiry as Critique: On the Legacy of Deweyan Pragmatism for Political Theory,
Political Studies 49(4), 2001: 73048. Several authors of the third response remain neo-Kantians, but
their Kantianism has been tempered by the practical objections of Hegel, Marx, Dewey and Rorty.
For an example, see Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jrgen Habermas and the Politics of
Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). For the formulation of the critical and
practical Enlightenment to which my analysis is indebted, see Foucault, What is Enlightenment?.
110
The next maxim of this critical and practical approach is feature three: the
acceptance of reasonable disagreement all the way down (in theory as well as
practice), not only over different conceptions of the good within a framework of fundamental principles of justice, procedures of deliberation or
constitutional essentials, but over any such framework as well. If this is true,
then dissent is inevitable among citizens, representatives, lawyers and
supreme court justices, as well as theorists.30 As a consequence, the orientation of practical philosophy should not be to reaching final agreements on
universal principles or procedures, but to ensuring that constitutional
democracies are always open to the democratic freedom of calling into
question and presenting reasons for the renegotiation of the prevailing
rules of law, principles of justice and practices of deliberation. Hence, the
first and perhaps only universalisable principle of democratic deliberation is
audi alteram partem, always listen to the other side, for there is always
something to be learned from the other side.31
The contestable character of constitutional democracy should not be
seen as a flaw that has to be overcome. The democratic freedom to disagree
and enter into agonistic negotiations over the prevailing constitutional
arrangements (or some subset of them) and the dominant theory of justice
that justifies them (such as the first response) is precisely the practice of
thought and action that keeps them from becoming sedimented either
taken for granted or taken as the universal, necessary and obligatory arrangements. At the beginning of Western constitutionalism, Socrates, in the
Apology, argued that this freedom of constantly questioning in dialogues
what we think we already know about democracy, for which he was willing
to die, is the very activity that improves it.
Accordingly, the major contribution of agonistic democrats has been to
stress the manifest reality of partisanship, dissent, disagreement, contestation and adversarial reasoning in the history and present of democratic
societies and the positive role it plays in exposing and overcoming structures
of inequality and injustice, fostering a critical democratic ethos and, eo ipso,
creating autonomous citizens with bonds of solidarity across real differences
(feature 6). They have argued this against the non-adversarial, classless
ideology of constitutional democratisation of the neo-liberal and thirdway defenders of the three trends (of the first response) and against the
30
31
Supreme Court of Canada, Reference re the Secession of Quebec, 68.

For the reasons supporting this claim, see Volume I, Chapter 9. Flexible institutions of adversarial
negotiation and the correlative principle of audi alteram partem in response to the fact of reasonable
disagreement constitute the main proposal of Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000).
111
exclusionary and assimilative dangers of the consensus models of deliberation and the abstract and universal conception of public reason (of the
second response).32 By exchanging pros and cons in dialogues with partners
who see the constitutional arrangement of a shared political association
differently and who can give reasons for their views, citizens are empowered
to free themselves from their partial and limited views to some extent (often
assumed to be universal), reflect critically together on them and negotiate
the modification of the relations of meaning and power that bear them: that
is, to think and act differently.33 After all is said and done, the democraticconstitutional citizens are not Lenin. They do not aim for the end of politics
and the administration of things. They are more akin to young Olympian
athletes who greet the dawns early light with a smile, rise, dust themselves
off, survey their gains and losses of the previous days, thank their gods for
such a challenging game and such worthy opponents, and engage in the
communicative-strategic agon anew.
As we have seen, this approach is committed to bringing these philosophical discussions into the closest possible relationship with practices of
democratic struggle on the ground. For otherwise there is at best a tenuous
link between abstract discussion of principles and concrete practice, and
legal and political philosophy tends to promote a kind of idle, talk-show
chatter about public reason in some mythical public sphere, overlooking the
situated knowledge, local skills and passionate partisanship of real democratic deliberation.34 However, when scholars turned to practice, rather
than seeing only the traditional, discrete institutions of constitutionalrepresentative democracy, which set the framework for critical reflection
for the last two hundred years, they discovered the much more complex
negotiated political associations of feature 5 and the three dominant trends
outlined in sections 1 and 2. The study of practices of democratic deliberation could not be restricted to constitutional essentials and constitutional
referendums nor to the genres of adversarial reasoning in the traditional
legal and political institutions. To test the constitutional and democratic
32
33
34
See the references to this literature at note 9. Disagreement and contestation have been accepted also by
neo-republicans such as Philip Pettit (Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997)) and Richard Bellamy (Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of
Compromise (London: Routledge, 1999)); liberals such as Anthony Laden (Reasonably Radical,
pp. 1949); and deliberative democrats such as John S. Dryzek (Deliberative Democracy and Beyond).
For an attempt to reformulate this Socratic insight into critical dialogue in the terms of hermeneutics,
critical theory and genealogy, see Herbert Kogler, The Power of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1999).
These are standard objections to the second response. For an excellent example from a practice-based
perspective of civic activism, see Dreyfus, Spinosa and Flores, Disclosing New Worlds, pp. 6989.
112
legitimacy of dispersed, overlapping and multilayered regimes of constitutional democracy, it is necessary to study the practices of democratic
freedom the modes of dispute conciliation in any practice of governance
in which those subject to, or affected by it, seek to reignite the embers of public
autonomy and have an effective say over how their conduct is governed.
The methodological implication of feature 5 is to shift to the study of the
motley of practices of democratic freedom vis--vis practices of governance,
of which the traditional courts, representative institutions, public sphere
and constituent assemblies are now seen as an important regulative subset
rather than the constitutive set. Furthermore, this requires a broader and
more fitting language of description of the object domain of legal and political
philosophy, namely the emerging language of nodes (of governance and
practices of democratic freedom) in negotiated networks. Again, this redescription does not displace the traditional language of description of constitutional representative democracy, as the hyper-globalisers advocate, but
relocates this familiar vocabulary as one important and enduring family in
larger and more complex languages of networks of rule and democratic
freedom.35
From this broadened horizon, the critical study of democratic freedom
includes research on the multiple forms of democratic activism and negotiation in practice that the legal scholar Richard Falk calls globalisation
from below, in contrast to the globalisation from above of the first trend
and the race to the bottom side of the second trend (section 2).36 By
globalisation from below, Falk does not mean that the exercise of popular
sovereignty occurs uniquely in the lowest stratum of some new, overarching
global hierarchy.37 This would be to miss what the metaphor of a network is
meant to convey, namely that hierarchies of money, power, discourse and
violence exist within shifting networks of direct and indirect communication, rule and insubordination. Rather, as Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello
and Brendan Smith explain (adapting the work of Michael Mann to Falks
35
36
37
I owe this general way of putting the transformation of the language of description from a
Westphalian to a global perspective, without downplaying the continuing importance of the
traditional institutions of representative democracies, to David Held. See Held et al., Global
Transformations. See Chapter 2, this volume. For the corresponding transformation in the orientation
of deliberative democracy to concrete practices of governance in networks, see Dryzek, Deliberative
Democracy and Beyond, pp. 11540, Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), pp. 23676.
Richard Falks approach of globalisation from below is set out in Predatory Globalization.
For example, Hardt and Negri locate democratic activity in the lowest stratum of a traditional, threetiered global hierarchy. See Empire, pp. 30914.
113
insight), globalisation from below refers to the irruption of public

autonomy in interstitial locations or the:
nooks and crannies in and around the dominant institutions. Those who were
initially marginal then link together in ways that allow them to outflank those
institutions and force a reorganization of the status quo At certain points, people
see existing power institutions as blocking goals that could be obtained by coop
eration that transcends existing institutions. So people develop new networks that
outrun them. Such movements create subversive invisible connections across state
boundaries and the established channels between them. These interstitial networks
translate human goals into organizational means.38
While this form of interstitial democratic freedom is exemplified by NGOs,

globalisation from below can refer as well to the wider range of actors who,
through a variety of ways of having a say and renegotiating the rules of the
game anywhere in the network of regimes of governance, aim to approximate feature 4 (a democratically negotiated constitutional order), as Falk
and Brecher et alii illustrate. For example, one side of the second trend
comprises attempts to increase democratic legitimacy and self-determination
through subsidiarity, devolution and federalisation of traditional institutions
of government, not through bypassing traditional representative institutions.
For another, attempts to make representative institutions more representative
of the culturally diverse electorate through proportional representation,
whether within nation-states or a second chamber at the UN, seek to
strengthen rather than go beyond traditional institutions of constitutional
and democratic association.39
In sum, these are struggles of and for democratic freedom, practices of
freedom in which democratic actors seek, by means of traditional and new
forms of deliberation and negotiation, to challenge and modify the nondemocratic ways they are governed. By relating the theoretical discussion of
the principles of constitutionalism and democracy to research on these
concrete practices of democratic freedom and reworking the languages of
description and evaluation accordingly, the third response answers the
objections of activists to the abstractness and irrelevance of the second
response and establishes a new working relationship between philosophers
and democratic activists in which they learn from each other.40
38
39
40
Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity
(Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000).
For these examples, see Gagnon and Tully, eds., Multinational Democracies.
For these objections and the kind of response I have laid out here, see Iris Marion Young, Activist
Challenges to Deliberative Democracy, Political Theory 29(5), 2001: 67090. Both Falk, Predatory
114
The results of this kind of critical and practical inquiry by means of

reciprocal elucidation so far provisionally suggest that there are two major
types of relations of meaning and power that render contemporary citizens
unfree. These are relations of communication and governance that arbitrarily or unnecessarily constrain citizens from exercising their democratic
freedom to engage in effective practices of deliberation and negotiation of
the rules by which they are governed. They constrain the major democratic
struggles today, such as those over recognition, distribution or the environment, because the exercise of democratic freedom is the condition of
possibility of these kinds of democratic struggle, or of any other kind.41
These comprise the major means by which the trends of section 2 are able to
dominate present constitutional change, unchecked and unbalanced by
those subject to them. For the purposes of brief exposition, these two
categories of unfreedom can be classified as relations of exclusion and relations
of assimilation.42
Relations of exclusion refer to the various ways in which citizens are
excluded from initiating and entering into practices of democratic negotiation. In many cases, subjects are formally excluded, by modern slavery, the
denial of democratic rights of association and organisation, and military
intervention to crush movements of popular sovereignty and impose rule
from the outside, either directly or mediated through the post-colonial
forms of indirect control exercised by transnational corporations and global
regulatory agencies.43 There is also a variety of forms of exclusion where
democratic rights are formally guaranteed. As Noam Chomsky has documented many times, powerful states such as the United States and its allies
profess support for democratic rights and the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights while pursuing foreign policies that ignore,
support or instigate their abuse and subvert international human rights
41
42
43
Globalization, pp. 12585, and Brecher, Costello and Smith, Globalization from Below, set out detailed
proposals for uniting normative theory and democratic activism. For an important reformulation of
feminist philosophy around practices of democratic activity, to which I am indebted, see Cressida
Heyes, Line Drawings: Defining Women Through Feminist Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2000).
For a more detailed account of practices of freedom, adapted from Foucaults initial use of this
concept, and the points that follow, see Chapters 2 and 3, this volume. For a similar account of
freedom as forms of democratic activity, see Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in
Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 329.
For an introduction to the analysis of specific types of exclusion and assimilation in practices of
deliberation, see Laden, Reasonably Radical, pp. 13185; Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 16153;
James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1997); Brown, States of Injury.
See references at notes 18 and 20. For modern slavery, see Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery
in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
115
institutions when it suits their economic and geopolitical interests.44 In

more subtle types of cases, subjects with formal democratic rights are unable
to exercise them due to lack of money, time and knowledge, because their
voices are not taken seriously due to deep-seated class, racist and sexist
stereotypes, or because their job hangs on their silence.45 Another common
form of exclusion in the face of democratic rights occurs when the actors
responsible for the exclusion are not accountable to the local rights regime
(the problem of the third trend in section 2).
The most outstanding form of exclusion remains the one Dewey identified as paramount: the exclusion of those subject to national and transnational corporations from having a democratic say over them. As we have
seen in section 2, many of these corporations are now more powerful than
many constitutional democracies and govern the conduct of more subjects.
They also exercise non-democratic control over the decision-making of
constitutional democracies (as Rawls stressed). For over a century corporations have excluded employees and those affected by their operations from
having a democratic say on the constitutional grounds that they are private
persons and so possess the right of non-interference (the freedom of the
moderns), and are not subject to democratic control (the freedom of the
ancients). Under this mode of legitimation they have grown to surpass and
control the representative nation-state, the type of corporation that has been
sovereign for the last four hundred years. Just as the principles of constitutionalism and democracy were originally designed to bring the absolutist
form of the modern state under democratic control, by establishing democratic institutions within it, the task today is to apply the same principles to
these new sovereign corporations and bring them under democratic control,
by establishing practices of democratic freedom within them, as well as
governing them from the outside by means of new and effective international representative bodies. For, despite the attempts to keep this form of
exclusion from public scrutiny in the dominant neo-liberal and third-way
ideologies (by eliminating the principle of democracy as a condition of
legitimacy), there appears to be no unquestionable reason for this exemption from the exercise of the principle of democracy.46
44
45
46
The research by Chomsky on this form of exclusion is voluminous. See, for example, Rogue States,
pp. 10873, and references.
Laden, Reasonably Radical, pp. 13158.
For Dewey, democracy and corporations, see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American
Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). This form of exclusion is a central theme of
Falk, Predatory Globalization; Held, Democracy and the Global Order; and Chomsky, Rogue States,
among others. Despite the formal exemption this is where many struggles of democratic freedom
116
The second category of unfreedom is brought about by relations of

inclusion and assimilation. Subjects are permitted and often encouraged
to participate in democratic practices of deliberation yet are constrained to
deliberate in a particular way, in a particular type of institution and over a
particular range of issues. Their agreements and disagreements therefore
serve to reinforce rather than challenge the status quo. Through participation in these assimilative practices, they gradually come to relinquish their
dissonant customs and ways and acquire the consonant forms of subjectivity. Although they are governed through their freedom to some extent, they
nevertheless deliberate within the rules rather than over the rules, as the
principle of democracy requires.47
Different practices of reasoning-with-others are grounded in distinctive
customary local knowledges, repertoires of practical skills, genres of argumentation and tacit ways of relating to one another. These culturally and historically diverse genres of practical know-how or savoir-faire (metis in Greek)
are the intersubjective bases of culturally diverse practices of deliberation
of raising questions and listening to others, of presenting a reason, a story, an
example, a comparison, a gesture or a parable for consideration, showing
rather than saying, expressing disagreement, deferring or challenging, taking a
point, informing another, advising and taking advice, speaking for another
and being spoken for, stonewalling, feet-dragging and feigning, dissenting
through silence, breaking off talks, working towards a compromise, agreeing
conditionally or unconditionally, following the agreement reached in toward
and untoward ways, reviewing the agreements reached, restarting the deliberations, and countless other discursive and non-discursive activities that
make up deliberative language games. When formerly excluded people are
included in practices of democratic deliberation, they often find that the
practical knowledge of the practice is different from the ones to which they are
accustomed. This is often overlooked by the dominant groups, for it is their
customary way of reasoning together; or if it is noticed, it is often presented as
canonical, as universal or the uniquely reasonable, modern or free and equal
way of deliberating, as if there were only one way of exercising democratic
freedom. If one wishes to be heard, then, it is necessary to act in accordance
47
have been ignited over the last 170 years. For the rise and fall of the nation-state as the dominant
corporation of governance, see Martin L. Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge:
Rose, Powers of Freedom. See also Clarissa Hayward, De-facing Power (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), for a complementary analysis of this form of unfreedom. These approaches
(and mine) are indebted to the work of Foucault on the agonistic interaction between imposed forms
of subjectification and practices of freedom. See Foucault, The Subject and Power, in The Essential
Works, Vol. III, and Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern for Self .
117
with the dominant practice of reasoning together and resolving differences,

and, as a result, to gradually develop the form of identity and comportment
characteristic of participants of this kind of practice. This is the unfreedom of
assimilation, for one is not free to challenge the implicit and explicit rules of
the dominant practice of deliberation, but must conform to them and so be
shaped by them.48
There is a remarkably wide range of relations of communication and
power which serve to assimilate through inclusion in unfree practices of
deliberation, adversarial reasoning and dispute resolution. Iris Marion
Young has shown that the exchange of reasons cannot be abstracted from
different modes of speaking and listening, such as greeting, rhetoric and
narrative, without silencing legitimate voices. The attempt to impose
certain allegedly abstract and universal rules often just privileges dominant
forms of reasoning, often of a simplified and aggressive kind, typical of
many Western institutions of dispute resolution, oriented to winning an
exchange with opponents rather than promoting the kind of mutual understanding necessary for progress among partners who disagree but nonetheless need to cooperate freely.49 The exchange of public reasons also cannot
be separated from the cultural, linguistic, ethnic and gendered identities of
those participating or from their substantive conceptions of the good, as the
earlier theorists of deliberation sometimes assumed.50 Just as deeply
ingrained sexist, racist and diversity-blind attitudes can operate to exclude
oppressed and subordinated people, they can also operate to discount and
ignore their modes of argumentation once they are included, both in
practice and in theories of deliberation.51 If deliberation is oriented to a
consensus, then, given reasonable disagreement, this will ensure that some
minority voices will be silenced along the way. Moreover, deliberation
48
49
50
51
For this account of practical reasoning, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 30941;
Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Dreyfus,
Spinosa and Flores, Disclosing New Worlds. As this paragraph is meant to convey, there is nothing
specifically Western about democratic freedom, of having a say over the way one is governed and
often struggling not to be governed in such and such a way, nor is it necessarily related to Western
institutions of representative government. On the contrary, three leading trends and their discourses
of legitimation in Western societies are opposed to it. Democratic freedom in the sense I am using it
seems to be a fairly general human activity, which takes different forms in different times and
cultures.
Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 5280, and her Intersecting Voices, pp. 3894.
Laden, Reasonably Radical, pp. 15985; and David Owen, The Avoidance of Cruelty: Joshing Rorty on
Liberalism, Scepticism and Ironism, in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, eds. Matthew Festenstein and
Simon Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). For some types of argumentation typical of practical
deliberation, see Walton, The New Dialectic.
Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
118
involves a visceral or passionate dimension that was ignored in the more

abstract accounts.52
The devolution of democratic practices to groups and peoples within
multinational associations to solve problems of assimilation in the institutions of the larger society often overlooks assimilation of weak minorities
within the devolved institutions. In addition, the recent repatriation of
limited self-governing powers by Indigenous peoples from the states that
have taken their lands, destroyed their customary practices of governance
and reduced their populations to a fraction of pre-contact levels perpetuates
a powerful form of assimilation called domestication or internal colonisation (an example of the second trend).53 The ways in which local residents in
poor countries are induced to participate in deliberations associated with
development projects and employ their local knowledge in these settings
often have the effect of gradually creating a Western identity and outlook
and commodifying their traditional knowledge.54
The most persuasive form of assimilation, as we have seen in section 2, is
assimilation to the dominant identity of a consumer of lifestyles celebrated
in the first response. Most members of contemporary societies are subject to
these processes of subjectification most of the time, not only in practices of
deliberation, but in virtue of participating in the practices of work and
leisure.55 Furthermore, this kind of assimilation in developed countries is
often coordinated with complementary forms of exclusion and assimilation
for those in developing countries who make the consumer products that
define the various lifestyles, as Naomi Kleins research discloses.56 The
danger of assimilation to this form of subjectivity, as the proponents of
responses two and three argue, is twofold. It tends to eliminate the selfawareness of the possibility of and reason for democratic freedom itself, by
reducing freedom to the freedom of the moderns. And, in virtue of performing most of ones activities in practices which disallow or discourage
collective reflection and deliberation over the rules of the practice in a
diversity of ways, participants do not acquire the self-formation of democratic freedom, and so they have neither the experience of nor subjective
interest in democratic participation.
52
53
54
55
56
Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist, pp. 1946.

Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Sanders, Introduction, in Political Theory and the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples.
Traintafillou and Nielson, Policing Empowerment, and Chapters 7 and 9, this volume.
For an overview of this literature, see Bauman, Globalization; and John Tomlinson, Globalization and
Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Knopf, 2000).
119
Relations of exclusion and assimilation, finally, work together to block

processes of citizenisation: that is, the processes of identity formation
among diverse citizens who deliberate freely together over their shared
and contested rules of recognition, distribution and coordination, and so
conciliate their differences over generations (feature 6). The unique kind of
solidarity that has the capacity to hold together the diverse contemporary
political associations is not generated. In Habermas phrase, it remains an
unfulfilled promise. Subjects are excluded and assimilated from the practical
basis of solidaritys continual regeneration: namely, forms of life that
embody the principle of democracy in endlessly different ways. If this analysis
is partially correct, then contemporary constitutional democracies will continue to experience a dominant tendency not only to democratic deficits and
illegitimacy but, as a result, also towards a lack of overall cohesion.57 Without
the experience of democratic freedom, citizens tend in the extreme to cohere
instead around the protection of their capitalist patterns of consumption at
one end (McWorld) and the protection of their excluded religious and
cultural identities at the other (Jihad).58
conclusion
Despite the great differences between constitutional democracy in 1819 and
today, there is one striking similarity. At the end of The Liberty of the
Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns, Constant warned that the
danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private
independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should
surrender our right to share in political power too easily. This, as I have
sought to show, is our danger as well. Like the contributors to the critical
discussion today, Constant argued that, far from renouncing either of the
two sorts of freedom which I have described to you, it is necessary, as I have
shown, to learn to combine the two together. This is a difficult lesson to
learn because, as Constant reasoned, and as we have seen in our times,
the relations of communication and power in the practices in which
moderns find themselves tend to exclude them from ancient freedom
57
58
Both these trends are widely noted and studied, but they are normally not seen to derive from the lack
of democratic freedom. Indeed, the standard account is that increased democratic freedom over the
rules of recognition and distribution is the cause of disunity. See Catriona McKinnon and Iain
Hampsher-Monk, Introduction, in The Demands of Citizenship (London: Continuum, 2000).
This is the chilling diagnosis of Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism
are Reshaping the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), all the more relevant after September 11,
2001. His response is that democracy may now have become our first and only hope, p. 292.
120
and to assimilate them to modern freedom alone. The solution Constant

proposed was to petition the legislator to create practices of citizenisation
and encourage citizens to participate, thereby acquiring the identity formation and desire to continue to exercise and uphold their democratic
freedom on a par with their private freedoms:
The work of the legislator is not complete when he has simply brought peace to the
people. Institutions must achieve the moral education of the citizens. By respecting
their individual rights, securing their independence, refraining from troubling their
work, they must nevertheless consecrate their influence over public affairs, call
them to contribute by their votes to the exercise of power, grant them a right of
control and supervision by expressing their opinions; and by forming them through
practice for these elevated functions, give them both the desire and the right to
discharge these.59
While Constants advice to look to practices of freedom is as pertinent

now as then, the suggestion that representative governments and their
administrative bureaucracies might play the primary or exclusive role in
initiating new democratic practices should be viewed with some scepticism
for the host of reasons discussed above.60 Rather, despite the powerful
trends to the exclusion and assimilation of democratic freedom and the
dominant discourses that legitimate them, practices of and for democratic
freedom irrupt in opposition to them in a multiplicity of nodes and networks, and around a multiplicity of issues. Democratic freedom fighters
find ways to organise their unrest and reignite the embers of public
autonomy through the vast array of traditional and non-traditional avenues
and institutions that make up globalisation from below.61
A public philosophy in a new key and oriented to testing the constitutional and democratic legitimacy of contemporary polities could do worse
than to take these practices of freedom as its field of study and investigate
them in the manner canvassed in the last section. The primary difference
from the more traditional second response is that the field of study is not the
analysis of the idealised exchange of public reasons among free and equal
citizens in the traditionally conceived institutions of constitutional democracy, or a projection of these to a utopian cosmopolis. Rather, it starts from
59
60
61
Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns, pp. 326, 327, 328.
For a sustained analysis of the dangers of the turn, or return, to representative governments and their
administrative bureaucracies in order to reignite and guide the embers of public autonomy, see
Brown, States of Injury.
For an instructive example of this kind of research, see Sonia E. Alvarez, Translating the Global:
Effects of Transnational Organizing on Local Feminist Discourses and Practices in Latin America,
Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 1(1), 2000: 2967.
121
here and now hic Rhodus, hic saltus and it involves broader research
enterprises of working back and forth in a dialogue between actual networks
of practices of democratic negotiation and critical clarification under the
principles of constitutionalism and democracy. In a time when the legal and
political order is constituted by open-ended networks of negotiated conciliation rather than rigid foundations, this kind of research must itself be a
continuous activity of reciprocal reflection involving a variety of relations of
communication between philosophy and the public affairs it studies. To
draw together the threads of the four previous sections, this critical and
practical research consists of a permanent activity of four main steps.62
Firstly, given the density of relations of exclusion and assimilation, one
cannot begin from the formalised institutions of deliberation once under
way, as theorists have tended to do. Rather, one must begin one step back,
from the many ways in which democrats are somehow able to organise and
initiate practices of freedom that seek to expose, criticise and overcome
local relations of exclusion and to enter prevailing institutions or invent
ad hoc practices of deliberation. This step of initiation is itself the first and
primary exercise of democratic freedom, the step Rawls and Habermas call
reignition and regeneration of public autonomy.63
If initiation is successful and negotiations take place, then the second step
of study is the practices of negotiation. This classic domain of practiceoriented deliberative democratic theory includes the study of procedures
and exchanges of reasons in reciprocal relations to context-sensitive applications of the norms of constitutionalism and democracy. It should also
encompass similar studies of the content of the agreement reached and of
the reasons for and against. In addition, close attention should be given to
the Socratic type of democratic freedom in actual deliberations: the way in
62
63
For an exposition of this kind of critical and practical activity in the context of feminist philosophy,
see Heyes, Line Drawings, and in anthropology see Clifford Geertz, The World in Pieces: Culture
and Politics at the End of the Century, in Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical
Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). I discuss the four steps and the mutual
relationship between philosophical inquiry and practical activities in more detail in Volume I,
Chapter 1.
This first stage of initiating deliberation by problematising the forms of exclusion and assimilation in
prevailing relations of communication and power, by speaking truth to power, has been the domain
of agonistic democratic theorists. However, there has been a tendency among some to treat this as the
only stage of critical reflection, and this has led to the objection that agonistic approaches are as
abstracted and disengaged from democratic politics as the first phase of deliberative democrats. To
overcome this objection (whatever its merits), the suggestion here is to link the analysis of forms of
problematisation to the next steps, the negotiations and reforms that follow or fail to follow, as Michel
Foucault recommended (Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, in The Essential Works, Vol. I, p. 316).
For an overview of discourse analysis from this perspective, see David Howarth, Discourse
(Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000).
122
which participants are able to call into question and remove the habitual
and strategic relations of assimilation that govern the practice of deliberation, or fail to do so, thereby democraticising the deliberations and the
deliberators as they proceed.64
Thirdly, studies of deliberative democracy often end with the agreement
reached, on the assumption that normative clarification ends with testing an
agreement against the ideal agreement. Critical analysis should proceed
beyond the agreement because the agreement and the normative models
of its assessment will always be less than perfect, partial, subject to reasonable disagreement, and dissent will likely break out in practice and theory,
reigniting the process. Any normative model of procedures or agreements
will harbour elements of exclusion and assimilation and so will have to
be continually tested against its capacity to shed light on deliberations in
practice and in comparison to other models in theory.
Fourthly, this traditional end-point of normative analysis, even when it is
related to practical case studies, leaves the entire field of implementation
and review to empirical social sciences, often under the false assumption
that implementation is different in kind from justification, simply a technical question of applying rigid rules correctly. There are many ways in
which actors can agree to a settlement (an equity policy in the workplace, an
environmental accord, a constitutional amendment, a self-government
agreement, an international human rights document) and either avoid or
subvert implementation while appearing to follow norms of legitimation.
Moreover, there are numerous ways actors can interpret and act in accord
with an agreement once it is implemented. Disputes inevitably break out
over these rival interpretations, giving rise to institutions of review that are
themselves new practices of deliberation. Relations of exclusion and assimilation appear in the implementation that were not foreseen in the agreement. Hence, implementation and review raise similar issues of legitimacy
under the principles of constitutionalism and democracy as the phases of
64
These two steps distinguish the critical and practical approach from the important work of scholars in
the Governmentality school. Their focus is on the ways in which moderns are governed through their
freedoms within practices of governmentality. The critical and practical approach learns from these
important studies and sees them as preliminary to its concern with the practice-relative abilities of
humans to exercise democratic freedom of thought and action: to call into question and have say over
the ways in which they are governed through their freedoms, whatever these freedoms may be.
Nikolas Rose discusses the difference between the two research projects in Powers of Freedom, p. 281.
These non-transcendental abilities to go on differently in various practices are explored in Owen,
Orientation and Enlightenment. From the perspective of communications theory, see John Shotter,
Conversational Realities: Constructing Life Through Language (London: Sage, 1993).
123
initiation, deliberation and agreement, and thereby reinitiate practices of

freedom and forms of critical reflection.
When legitimacy rests on the mutual relationship between norms and
practices of constitutionalism and democracy, we are always in the position
of beginning again the permanent task of testing the limits of our freedom
by means of our freedom.65
65
This brief sketch of public philosophy and civic freedom is deepened in Part 2 of this volume, in the
light of imperialism, and then reformulated more comprehensively in Chapters 8 and 9.
PART
On imperialism
chapter 5
On law, democracy and imperialism
introduction: the field of political theory

and public law
In the course of my research on globalisation and freedom in Part 1, I came
to see that the languages in which the global order was disclosed, studied and
criticised were useful and necessary, yet ultimately limited and inadequate to
expose fully the deep-seated global relationships of oppression of inequality, dependency, domination, exploitation and environmental damage. I
gradually realised that many of the global relationships that govern the
conduct of people and peoples are imperial relationships. These oppressive
relationships were built up during the age of formal Western imperialism
and they have survived decolonisation and intensified in the current period.
I thus had to shift my focus to the imperial dimensions of the present global
order. In this chapter I investigate how our dominant languages of disclosure and research conceal and overlook the imperialism of the present, each
in different ways, and in so doing gradually bring the contemporary mode
of imperialism (informal imperialism) into view as an object of critique in
theory and transformation in practice.1
Since formal decolonisation in the middle of the twentieth century most
theories of public law and political formations begin from the presupposition that the field of law and politics is one of sovereign, constitutional states
bound together by public international law.2 Yet, over the last fifteen years,
I would like to thank all the generous scholars who participated in the discussion of an earlier version of
this chapter when I gave it as a lecture at the University of Edinburgh in 2005: Gavin Anderson, Zenon
Bankowski, Emilios Christodoulidis, Hans Lindahl, Martin Loughlin, Sir Neil MacCormick, Paul
Patton, Stephen Tierney, Neil Walker. Their questions and criticisms have been immensely helpful in
rewriting the lecture for publication, even though I am sure I have failed to answer them satisfactorily.
1
The practices of transformation are presented in Volume I, Chapters 8 and 9.
2
I follow Martin Loughlin in using public law and constitutional law interchangeably. I also follow
him in taking public law to be the basic laws that juridicalise or legalise the distribution, institutionalisation and exercise of the political powers of governing, including governing the economy, in any
127
128
On imperialism
this widely shared presupposition has been challenged as simply one way of
characterising the field of constitutional law and political association among
others, and the broader issue of how to characterise the field of law and
politics has become a central question to which rival answers have been
presented and debated.3
Over the last six or seven years, the oldest answer to this central question
has been reintroduced into the mainstream debate: namely, that the world
legal and political order is best characterised as an imperial order of some
kind or another. Several scholars since decolonisation continued to study
state and international law and politics as an imperial field, but their work
remained on the margins of the mainstream debate. However, since 2000,
and especially after 2001, imperialism has returned to the mainstream.
There is now a large body of literature arguing that the field of public law
and political organisation is characterised better as some form of new
imperialism or empire than as any of the other rival answers to the central
question of the nature of the field we are trying to study.
Roughly speaking, the new imperialism is said to comprise the United
States as the primary, but not necessarily exclusive or unilateral, imperial
hegemon, working with or against an informal league of cooperating and
competing sovereign, constitutional, representative states or great powers
(the G8) and transnational corporations; operating through, or in tension
with, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), the
World Trade Organization (WTO), unequal or manipulable international
or transnational legal regimes since the original General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT 1947); and backed up by the full spectrum global
dominance of the US military and its coalition of willing and unwilling
allies, proxies and dependencies. This imperial view of the field, in one
variation or another, is advanced and praised by a large number of realists,
neo-conservatives and neo-liberal and traditional liberal imperialists;4 and it
3
4
form of legal and political association. Like Loughlin, who follows Foucault on this, I call the basic
legal and political institutions practices of governance; Martin Loughlin, The Idea of Public Law
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 531, especially pp. 2931. Whether public law constitutes the basic forms of political and economic power (liberalism) or is constituted by them
(Marxism), or some more complicated relationship (my view) is not a question we need to answer
for the analysis that follows. See the important discussion in Martin Loughlin, Constitutional Theory:
A 25th Anniversary Essay, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 25(2), 2005: 183202.
See, for example, Held and McGrew, eds., The Global Transformations Reader.
See David Armstrong, Dick Cheneys Song of America: Drafting a Plan for Global Dominance,
Harpers Magazine 305(1829), 2002: 7683; William Finnegan, The Economics of Empire: Notes on
the Washington Consensus, Harpers Magazine 306(1836), 2003: 4154; and Nichols Guyatt, Another
American Century?: The United States and the World Since 9/11 (London: Zed Books, 2003) for the rise
of the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century since 1997. For the proponents of US
empire, Robert Kagan, The Benevolent Empire, Foreign Policy 111 (Summer), 1998: 2435; see
129
is advanced and condemned by a large number of anti-imperial scholars on

the left and on the so-called isolationist right.5
The introduction of imperialism into the mainstream debate over the
central question was closely associated with the foreign policy of the United
States under the George W. Bush administrations (20002008) and the
expansion of the War on Terror that began earlier under Presidents Reagan
and George Bush senior. As a result, imperialism in general has tended to
be equated with this specific form of new imperialism in both theory and
practice. Consequently, those who deny that the field is imperial, and those
critics who agree that the field is imperial but criticise it and claim to
advance a non-imperial alternative to work towards, both tend to take the
new imperialism as the exemplar of imperialism in general. By focusing on
the specific definition of the new imperialism as the object of contrast, these
presumptively or allegedly non-imperial theories of what the nature of the
field is or should be, I will argue, tend not to notice the features of both the
shared languages of description they employ and the practices of governance
(legal and political institutions) they refer to that are imperial in a broader
sense of the term. The opportunity to subject our leading theories of public
law and politics to a deeper self-examination of their persisting imperial
features is thus bypassed. Fortunately, these unexamined imperial features
can be exposed by referring to the broader history of imperialism and the
work of anti-imperial scholars who have studied its persistence throughout
Richard H. Haass, Imperial America (11 November 2000), available at: www.brook.edu/views/
articles/haass/19990909primacy FA.htm [Accessed 25 October 2006]; Sebastian Mallaby, The
Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire, Foreign Affairs
81(2), 2002: 625; Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New
York: Random House, 2002); and Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground (New York:
Random House, 2005). For the new liberal imperialists, see Robert Cooper, Why We Still Need
Empires, Observer Worldwide (7 April 2002), available at: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/
story/0,,680117,00.html [Accessed 25 October 2006]; Robert Cooper, The Post-Modern State,
Observer Worldwide (7 April 2002), available at: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/
0,11581,680095,00.html [Accessed 25 October 2006]; Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: NationBuilding in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan (London: Vintage, 2003); Fareed Zakari, The Future of
Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2003); Niall Ferguson,
Colossus: The Price of Americas Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004); Deepak Lal, In Praise of
Empires: Globalization and Order (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). For a critical assessment
of them, see Michael Cox, The Empires Back in Town: Or Americas Imperial Temptation Again,
Millennium 32(1), 2003: 127; Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure
of Good Intentions (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Rahul Rao, The Empire Writes Back (to Michael
Ignatieff), Millennium 33(1), 2004: 14566. For the continuity between the new liberal imperialists
and the earlier liberal international law imperialists of the interwar period, see Jeanne Morefield,
Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005).
I discuss the critics of contemporary imperialism, in its narrow and broad definitions, below. For a
representative collection, see John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, eds., Pox Americana:
Exposing the American Empire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).
130
On imperialism
the twentieth century, yet whose work has not been part of the recent
mainstream debate over the character of the global field of law and politics.6
Accordingly, I proceed in the following manner. Each of the five sets of
presumptively or allegedly anti-imperial theorists I examine in the following
sections foregrounds and criticises a range of political and legal phenomena
they take to be imperial. They then present an alternative based on languages and practices that they take to be non-imperial in contrast. However,
in each case, I argue that the presumptively or allegedly non-imperial
languages and practices on which their criticism and alternative are based
are neither outside of contemporary imperialism nor the means of liberating
us from imperialism. Rather, in each case, features of both the languages and
the practices they presume to be external to imperialism (non-imperial) turn
out on closer examination to be internal to, or play a role in, contemporary
imperialism.7
Another way of putting this point is that the range of phenomena that
each set of writers foregrounds as imperial is not the entire imperial field,
but only specific aspects of it. So, what they present as an alternative is often
another aspect of imperialism they did not foreground in their criticism
but left unexamined in the background. So, what we see by the end of the
examination is that certain features of many allegedly or presumptively nonimperial languages of description and practices are internally related to
imperialism in some way or another. The conclusion is that we are
entangled in a more complex web of imperial relationships than the defenders and critics of imperialism suggest.8
1 the first or traditional critics: overlooking
the continuity of informal imperialism
Before I turn to the writers who explicitly reject or accept and criticise the
hypothesis that legal and political power is organised to some extent
6
7
8
There are exceptions to this generalisation. For example, Hardt and Negri, Empire, and Noam
Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: Americas Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan,
2003), are discussed to some extent in the mainstream debates and they have broader conceptions of
empire and imperialism respectively.
For a defence of this historical and critical approach, see Volume I, Chapter 1.
I do not mean by this that there is no outside or that everything is empire (as Hardt and Negri claim).
As we will see, imperialism is more complex than its defenders and critics presume, but it is only
features of the hegemonic political and legal languages and practices that are implicated in it, not the
languages and practices simpliciter, and these features are contingent and changeable (as Johan Galtung
always insisted). Indeed, if my investigation is correct, imperialism is not as global and total as it
appears, and alternative, non-imperial ways of living in the present are not only possible, but actual to
some degree in the lived experience of millions of people.
131
imperially in the present, I would like to start with those writers who start
from the presupposition that the legal and political field is non-imperial.
This response is especially pronounced among traditional state-centred legal
and political theorists. They argue, or more commonly presuppose, that
there is not an imperial order today and carry on a traditional form of legal
and political theory that takes for its horizon the system of sovereign,
constitutional states and public international law, or, the modification
of this Westphalian framework by the United Nations Charter and
Declaration of Human Rights and new forms of global governance. This
well-established framework gains strength from the widely held assumption
in the late twentieth century that a necessary criterion of imperialism is the
possession of colonies. Since the world went through a period of decolonisation, independent state-building and democratisation in the middle of
the twentieth century, and thus entered into a post-colonial period after the
1970s (or after 1989 in the case of the land-based Soviet empire), then the
present post-colonial period of 19702009 must be, by definition, a postimperial period.
The presumption that imperialism ends with decolonisation is reinforced
by the fact that international law recognises formally equal and independent
states, and this form of recognition seems to exclude the possibility of
imperialism. Moreover, the global governance literature further entrenches
the presumption by presenting global governance as the recent transformation of the pre-existing system of independent states, and thus as two steps
away from imperialism.9 Moreover, the system of independent states is
often projected back to 1648 by characterising it as a Westphalian system of
states, thereby overlooking the last four hundred years of European empires
and colonies.10
However, the assumption that imperialism always entails colonies is
false. One of the major forms of imperial rule in the West has been
9
10
See, for example, Held et al., Global Transformations; and Held, Models of Democracy, final chapter.
Whereas the classic theories from Hobbes to Schmitt, on which the contemporary Westphalians
construct their theories of national and international public law and representative government,
always distinguish between the system of states within Europe and the system of imperial states and
colonies between Europe and the rest of the world. That is, the European state was always considered
to be an imperial state or state empire in competition with other imperial states over the resources
of the non-European world until after the Second World War. See Edward Keene, Beyond the
Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002); John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan, My Ambition is Much Higher than
Independence: US Power, the UN World, the Nation-State, and their Critics, in Decolonization:
Perspectives from Now and Then, ed. Prasenjut Duara (London: Routledge, 2004); Antony Anghie,
Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), and below.
132
On imperialism
non-colonial: that is, the tradition of informal imperial rule over another
people or peoples by means of military threats and military intervention, the
imposition of global markets dominated by the great powers, a dependent
local governing class, and a host of other informal techniques of indirect
legal, political, educational and cultural rule, such as spheres of influence
and protectorates, without or after the imposition of formal colonial rule.
The rule of Britain over the Middle East in the early twentieth century and
the informal rule of the United States over Latin America in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries are classic examples of informal imperialism prior
to decolonisation.11
More importantly, when the United States turned to overseas economic
expansion in 18981903 (into Latin America, South America and China), the
policy debate was between those who favoured colonial imperialism (as in the
Philippines, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands) and those who favoured
non-colonial, informal imperialism by means of military bases (as with the
Guantnamo Bay military base of 1901), economic power and military
intervention whenever necessary to protect and extend US economic interests. Charles A. Conant summed up the options and put the case for informal
imperialism in 1898:
Whether the United States shall actually acquire territorial possessions, shall set up
captain generalships and garrisons, [or] whether they shall adopt the middle ground
of protecting sovereignties nominally independent, or whether they shall content
themselves with naval stations and diplomatic representations as the basis for
asserting their rights to the free commerce of the East, is a matter of detail
The writer is not an advocate of imperialism from sentiment, but does not fear the
name if it means only that the United States shall assert their right to free markets in
all the old countries which are being opened up to the surplus resources of
capitalistic countries and thereby given the benefits of modern civilization.12
11
12
The classic text of informal or free trade imperialism is Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, The
Imperialism of Free Trade, Economic History Review 6(1), 1953: 115. It is analysed by Wolfgang
Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), pp. 8693; Michael
Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); and Harry Magdoff, Imperialism Without
Colonies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003). Stephen Howe summarises how it applies to US
imperialism throughout the twentieth century in Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), and in American Empire: The History and Future of an Idea,
OpenDemocracy (12 June 2003), available at: www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-americanpower/
article 1279.jspt [Accessed 25 October 2006]. Mommsen sees it as the most important development
in the theory and practice of imperialism in the modern age and suggests that formal colonial rule is
only the tip of the imperial iceberg. The concept of informal imperialism is now used by the majority
of scholars of US imperialism, whether they are defenders or critics.
Charles A. Conant, The Economic Basis of Imperialism, North American Review 167(502), 1898: 339.
Like all the great theorists of imperialism in the late nineteenth century, from Marx and Lenin to
133
After the US war against the Philippine nationalists who had supported
them in their war against colonial Spain, and the colonisation of the
Philippines, the defenders of non-colonial imperialism won the debate.13
They justified it in the terms Conant presented, the Open Door policy of
Secretary of State John Hay, and a series of corollaries to the Monroe
Doctrine of 1823 by which the United States gave itself the right to intervene
to open the doors of Latin American countries to free trade dominated
by US firms, against Indigenous movements that tried to protect their own
resources and economies from foreign control on the one hand, and against
the European imperial powers claim to exclusive control of their formal or
informal colonies on the other. This doctrine and language of informal
imperialism, freedom as the opening of doors to free trade dominated by
US and European corporations, and so the spread of modern civilisation,
was repeated by Theodore Roosevelt in the first decade of the twentieth
century, Woodrow Wilson in the second and Franklin Roosevelt in the
1940s. As Andrew Bacevich, Chalmers Johnson and Neil Smith have
shown in detail (expanding the earlier scholarship of Charles Beard,
William A. Williams, and Robinson and Gallagher), this free trade imperialism without colonies has been the acknowledged form of global rule
exercised by the United States for over a century, and it is the form of
informal imperialism that persisted through formal decolonisation and is
exercised by the United States today according to both defenders and critics
of the new imperialism.14 Informal imperialism consists in, firstly, imposing
a structure of domestic public law and political institutions, or structurally
adjusting an existing constitutional order, that opens the resources, labour
and markets of the imperialised country to free trade dominated by the great
powers; and, secondly, subjecting this legal and political order in turn to
13
14
Hobson and Kautsky, Conant sees the huge expansion of informal imperialism over the nonEuropean world in the nineteenth century as driven by the transformation to corporation capitalism
in Europe and the United States.
John Bellamy Foster, Harry Magdoff and Robert McCheney, Kipling, the White Mans Burden,
and US Imperialism, in Pox Americana.
Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002); Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the
End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelts
Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). The
classic text of an earlier generation of US historians is William A. Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An
Essay on the Causes and Character of Americas Present Predicament, Along with a Few Thoughts About
an Alternative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). For a brief description of their account of
informal imperialism today, see the Introduction above, and see the analysis of it in the following
sections of this chapter. For the historical development of informal or free trade imperialism in
imperial Britain in the nineteenth century, see Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism:
Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism 17501850 (Cambridge:
134
On imperialism
regimes of public and private international laws, again constructed and

dominated by the great powers.15 Yet, it is unnoticed by current legal and
political theorists, who continue to write as if imperialism is a thing of the
distant past.
In summary, the traditional or Westphalian legal and political theorists,
who probably compose a majority of mainstream legal and political theorists, presuppose that the present order is non-imperial, and thus overlook
the persistence of informal imperialism.16
2 the second critics: overlooking the historical
length and breadth of informal imperialism
The second critics of imperialism acknowledge the existence of informal
imperialism but claim that it is restricted to the President Bush administrations, or at least no older than the Reagan administration. It thus could
be ended by the election of a new administration. For example, Michael
Mann, one of the leading theorists of modern forms of power, argues that a
Democratic administration would signal the end of empire.17 This is to
greatly underestimate the longevity and breadth of this form of imperialism.
As we have seen, informal imperialism has been in operation, with varying
degrees of success, since the nineteenth century and thus is not a recent
phenomenon, as these critics assume.
Moreover, informal imperial rule has always had two faces or wings.
One is the more unilateral and overtly militaristic face of the European new
imperialism over the scramble for Africa in the 1880s, of the Theodore
Roosevelt Administration in the early-twentieth-century United States,
and the George W. Bush administrations today. The other is the more
15
16
17
For the history of these two main legal and political features of informal imperialism, see Anghie,
Imperialism, and Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of
International Law, 18701960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For their operation
today, see James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, Empire with Imperialism: The Globalizing Dynamics of
Neo-Liberal Capitalism (New York: Palgrave, 2005).
While Martin Loughlin presents what is in many respects a classic Westphalian theory of public law
and political theory, he does explicitly respond to the imperial hypothesis, but only in the specific
form presented by Hardt and Negri in Empire, and only with respect to their challenge to the
traditional state-centred account of sovereignty, which is very different from the histories of imperialism I am drawing on here. See Loughlin, The Idea of Public Law, pp. 968.
Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003). For similar narrow (critical) interpretations
of contemporary imperialism, see Stefan Harper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The NeoConservatives and the Global Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); John Newhouse,
Imperial America: The Bush Assault on the World Order (New York: Vintage, 2004); George Soros, The
Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power (New York: Public Affairs,
2004).
135
multilateral and covertly militaristic approach of Woodrow Wilson, John F.

Kennedy and William Clinton. The latter is more inclined to work with
allies, especially the great imperial powers (G8), through the League of
Nations, UN and the Bretton Woods institutions set up after the Second
World War (GATT, WB, IMF, WTO), and in accord with international
law whenever possible. This wing employs economic pressure, sanctions and
bribes, and turns to military intervention only as a last resort in order to open
doors to the surplus resources of the capitalistic countries, as Conant put it
above.18 Hence, these current critics do not notice the longevity and breadth
of informal imperialism because they identify imperialism with only one of its
wings the unilateral and thus see the multilateral wing as non-imperial in
contrast.19
Moreover, the differences between these two wings within the broad,
overall imperial strategy are often overemphasised by these narrow critics.
For example, Woodrow Wilson invaded China, Haiti, Mexico and the
Dominican Republic to protect American economic interests from local
democratic control while he was proclaiming the right of self-determination
of the same countries and saw no contradiction between them.20 The defenders of the distinction often cannot agree on whether a particular administration, such as the Clinton administration, should be seen under one wing or
the other.21 Similarly, while the George W. Bush administration justified the
invasion of Afghanistan and the second Iraq war in terms of an aggressively
unilateral pre-emptive strike doctrine in the National Security Strategy of the
United States of America, 2002, they went on to try to justify both in terms of
UN resolutions and international law and to build a multilateral coalition of
the willing. Neither was presented as an exception to the norm, as Agamben
suggests, nor as a moralized non-juridical policy, as Habermas interprets it in
18
19
20
21
William K. Tabb, The Two Wings of the Eagle, in Pox Americana, is a short introduction. The two
wings are discussed in detail by Bacevich, American Empire, and Johnson, Sorrows of Empire. For an
interpretation of the domestic configuration of these two wings today, see Wendy Brown, American
Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization, Political Theory 34(6), 2006:
690714.
The debate over the new imperialism of the late nineteenth century is strikingly similar. The critics
of imperialism focused on the unilateral and militaristic imperialism of Cecil Rhodes and tended to
construe what Hobson and Kautsky called the hyper-imperialism of the great powers cooperating
informally over the exploitation of the non-European world as non-imperial. See Georgios
Varouxakis, Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Humanity in Victorian Political Thought,
European Journal of Political Theory 5(1), 2006: 10018.
See Bacevich, American Empire, pp. 11516 and below.
See the debate in Foreign Affairs between Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson, defenders of the
multilateral wing as non-imperial, and Robert Kagan, defender of the unilateral wing as imperial.
Robert Tucker and David Henderson, The Sources of American Legitimacy, Foreign Affairs 83(6),
2004: 1832; Robert Kagan, A Matter of Record, Foreign Affairs 84(1), 2005: 1703.
136
On imperialism
order to draw a categorical distinction between the Wilsonian and

(Theodore) Rooseveltian faces of US policy.22 The ease with which international laws and UN resolutions can be manipulated to legitimate the
invasion and occupation, and used, conversely, to try to delegitimate it by
the opponents of the war, suggests that the analyses of both Martti
Koskenniemi and constructivists are correct in general terms. Koskenniemi
argues that public international law is not a formal public law autonomous
from geopolitical forces but, rather, an informal set of laws open to effective
manipulation by the imperial Western powers of the day to justify imperialism in terms of civilising the non-European peoples in the nineteenth
century, military intervention against communists during the Cold War,
and terrorists and rogue states during the present War on Terror.23 As
Gerry Simpson concludes, international law can function as a form of legal
hegemony of the great powers or, as he calls them after decolonisation, the
unequal sovereigns.24
Finally, both wings of this shared imperial strategy accept the presence
and continuing expansion of the US global military empire of bases or
garrisons, which, according to the Pentagon, exercises full spectrum
dominance over the planet. Since the building of overseas garrisons and
fuelling stations during the first imperial expansion of 18981917, itself based
on the earlier military model of fortresses along the western frontier of wars
against the Native Americans from 1620 to 1890, there are now over 725
military bases outside of the United States. These military bases are literally
the bases of informal imperialism. Built on the model of the earlier naval
22
23
24
For the use of international law and UN resolutions, see Jutta Brunne and Stephen Toope,
Slouching Towards New Just Wars: The Hegemon After September 11th, International
Relations 18(4), 2004: 40523. The unilateral National Security Strategy of the United States of
America of September 2002 is available at: www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf [Accessed 26 October
2006]. The new Security Strategy of May 2006 repeats the same argument. Some rights were partially
extended to prisoners at Guantnamo Bay by the Supreme Court of the United States in Rasul et al. v.
Bush, President of the United States et al. [2004] 542 U.S. 466, available at: www.supremecourtus.gov/
opinions/03pdf/03334.pdf [Accessed 26 October 2006]. See the discussion in relation to Agamben in
Martin Puchner, Guantanamo Bay, London Review of Books 26(24), 2004: 7. For Jrgen Habermas
interpretation of US foreign policy as moralisation rather than juridification, see Jrgen Habermas,
The Kantian Project of the Constitutionalization of International Law: Does It Still Have a
Chance?, in Multiculturalism and the Law: A Critical Debate, ed. Omid Payrow Shabani (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2007).
Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer, pp. 480509. Koskenniemi does not discuss the fact that the
subaltern subjects of international law are also able to make public international law arguments in
countering the claims of the hegemonic powers, and sometimes even win the debates, as in the
Landmines Convention, as legal constructivists have shown. See below, section 7.
Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
137
bases of the British empire, they enable an imperial power to intervene, or

simply threaten to intervene, in any formally free and independent state at a
moments notice if its economic and geopolitical interests, or those of its
allies, are threatened by demands for local control of resources and markets.
The military bases are also supported by the continuous surveillance of the
planet by the navy, air force, satellites and the recent plans for the weaponisation of space. The US military command divides the world into four
zones or provinces governed by four US Commanders-in-Chief (CINC)
or pro-consuls. This global system of full spectrum dominance is ready for
military intervention, or the effective threat of military intervention, anywhere on the planet at a moments notice, as the militarys Joint Vision 2020
explains.25
In summary, these critics of the narrow interpretation of the new
imperialism overlook the long and broad background of informal imperial
rule, the cooperative imperialism of the multilateral wing and the global
system of US military imperialism that protects and extends the persisting
imperial order of domestic and international public laws and institutions.
3 the third critics: overlooking the imperial
features of the state system, development
and institutions of global governance
The third critical response is to recognise the length and breadth of informal
imperialism, but not the global military empire, and then to argue that there
is a European tradition of multilateralism, the rule of international law,
respect for the UN and the post-Bretton Woods international regulatory
regimes of global governance, now best exemplified by the EU. This
alternative, they argue, is a genuinely non-imperial alternative to both
wings of the US global strategy. This response comes in a number of
different forms. David Held argues that his cosmopolitan democracy offers
25
United States Department of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2020, An Evolving Joint
Perspective: US Joint Warfare and Crisis Resolution in the 21st Century (28 January 2003), available at:
www.dtic.mil/jointvision/jwcr screen.pdf [Accessed 26 October 2006]. The rise of this global
military empire is analysed by Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, and Bacevich, American Empire, both of
whom served in the military. See also the endorsement of it by new imperialists such as Max Boot, The
Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003); and
Kaplan, Imperial Grunts. For the effects on sovereignty and public law of the extension of global
military dominance by means of the weaponisation of space, see Jonathan Havercroft and Rod
Duvall, Taking Sovereignty out of this World: Space Weaponization and the Production of LateModern Political Subjects (paper delivered at the annual meeting of the International Political
Science Association, San Diego, 2225 March 2006).
138
On imperialism
a social democratic alternative to the Washington Consensus.26 Jrgen

Habermas, following Bardo Fassbender, suggests that the constitutionalisation of the UN Charter, as the public law of the existing international
community, and the empowerment of the UN to enforce compliance offer
a clear alternative.27 Even some authors on the left, who have written
important works on the history and presence of Western imperialism,
such as Samir Amin and David Harvey, suggest that a social-democratic
EU offers the best hope, although both concede that it would still be a kind
of imperialism, albeit a less-bad type.28
While the European and cosmopolitan critics arguably present an alternative to US informal imperialism, at least in its neo-liberal and neoconservative forms, it is difficult to see how it is non-imperial. It fails to
call into the space of questions the historically layered character of European
and American imperialism over the last half millennium. As we have seen,
these critics seem to present an alternative to the unilateral and neo-liberal
wing of US imperialism while embracing a version of the multilateral and
more social-democratic wing. Like the earlier deniers and critics, they take
the existing system of independent, constitutional states, public international law, global markets and corporations, and processes of development
for granted as the basis of their proposals (to constitutionalise, modify or
transform it). While they acknowledge that the system of states is stratified, they do not enquire into the colonial origins of the system of stratified
states to see if it is a persisting imperial system.29 Similarly, because these
critics disregard the depth and breadth of informal imperialism, they do not
ask if the post-Second World War institutions on which their proposals for
global governance and cosmopolitan democracy are built are not themselves
institutions of continuing informal imperialism. I think that if we enquire
into these questions, we will see that there is a yet deeper layer of imperial
features of our legal and political institutions that these critics leave unexamined and so presume to be the foundation of a non-imperial future.
26
27
28
29
David Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus
Habermas, The Kantian Project; and Bardo Fassbender, The United Nations Charter as
Constitution of the International Community, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 36, 1998:
529619.
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Samir Amin, Liberal
Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2004).
Habermas, The Kantian Project; and Rawls, The Law of Peoples. See Simpson, Great Powers and
Outlaw States for a criticism of both on these grounds. For a rejoinder to Habermas, see Frank Deppe,
Habermas Manifesto for a European Renaissance: A Critique, Socialist Register, 2005: 31323, and
below, section 5.
139
Firstly, the nominally sovereign and independent non-European states

recognised by international law are in fact the former colonies, whose legal
and political structures were constructed by the European powers to serve
their interests over two periods of colonial imperialism: 15001776 and the
second period of hyper-colonisation, 18001905, when 85 per cent of the
non-European world was under formal or informal imperial rule.30 Under
the standard of civilisation of nineteenth-century international law, these
uncivilised colonies were opened to free trade and structured accordingly
by the imperial powers under the Mandate System of the League of Nations
and the Trustee System of the United Nations.31 During the period of
decolonisation, state building, and the Cold War competition between the
United States and the Soviet Union, the Indigenous, westernised elites
wrested formal political power from their former masters, but this involved
a transfer of power and the continuation of existing informal imperial
relationships.32
To survive in the imperial world system in which they found themselves,
the national elites were both constrained and induced to modernise their
ethnically diverse peoples and their hinterland, often with great violence to
traditional legal and political formations, to define sharp boundaries of territory and unified nationhood where none existed, and to strengthen the
Western-style legal, political and military institutions of the colonial period
over Indigenous legal and political pluralism. They were also pressured to open
their doors to a highly structured capitalist world economy over which they
had no control (or to the socialist economy until 1989) at the expense of local
control of their economic affairs, to subordinate their own legal and political
sovereignty over their resources to international law, and to learn to call this
imperial subalternisation freedom. Moreover, they were led to take on
enormous debt to survive in the developmental race, to enter into the escalating dependency and debt of the arms race, and as a result of these relations of
dependency, to submit to the waves of modernisation programmes imposed
by the new global institutions of post-colonial, informal imperialism.33 The
30
31
32
33
For this legal and political history, see note 15 above.

Anghie, Imperialism, pp. 32196. For the expansion and intensification of Western imperialism to
85 per cent of the planet in the latter half of the nineteenth century, see Doyle, Empires, pp. 141352.
Wolfgang Mommsen, The End of Empire and the Continuity of Imperialism, in Imperialism and
After: Continuities and Discontinuities, eds. Wolfgang Mommsen and Jrgen Osterhammel (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1986), p. 350.
For a recent overview of the research on decolonisation and informal imperialism, see Prasenjit Duara,
ed., Decolonization: Perspectives from Then and Now (London: Routledge, 2004). For a restatement of
this thesis for Latin America and neo-liberal imperialism, see Duncan Green, Silent Revolution: The
Rise and Crisis of Market Economies in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003). For
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On imperialism
assault on the multiplicity of local forms of economics, politics, customary

law and civility that informal imperialism and dependency entail tends to
turn the people against their westernising elites, and this causes the elites to
become even more dependent on military rule and repression of local democracy.34 This entire process is what Frantz Fanon called, late in life, the
apotheosis of independence transformed into the curse of independence.35
As Alexander Wendt and Michael Barnett have shown, the consequence
is highly unstable and unrooted states whose levels of inequality, dependency and foreign control have increased rather than decreased since decolonisation.36 These subaltern states are now often called failed states and this
status justifies further informal military intervention and economic adjustment to the global economy. Very few neo-liberal imperialists mention
that the failed state is itself the product of waves of formal and informal
imperial replication nation-state building on one side, and the struggles of
resistance by the peoples who dream of creating their own forms of political
association and governing themselves in their own ways on the other.37
Thus, it is difficult to see how the existing state system and public
international law can be taken as the unexamined constitutional basis for
constructing a non-imperial alternative to contemporary imperialism.38 The
so-called Westphalian system is actually an imperial system of hegemonic
and subaltern states constructed in the course of interactions between
34
35
36
37
38
the resulting unequal sovereignty of the former colonies under international law, global governance
and the War on Terror, see Anghie, Imperialism, pp. 196310; for Africa, see Siba NZatioula
Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International
Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). For an introduction to the imperialising role
of WTO trade agreements, see Shrybman, The World Trade Organization.
The classic area study of this phenomenon is Barry Gills, Joel Rocamora and Richard Wilson, Low
Intensity Democracy, in Low Intensity Democracy: Political Power in the New World Order, eds. Barry
Gills, Joel Rocamora and Richard Wilson (London: Pluto Press, 1993).
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 978.
Alexander Wendt and Michael Barnett, Dependent State Formation and Third World
Militarization, Review of International Studies 19(4), 1993: 32147. For a forceful restatement, see
Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2006).
For this oversight among recent liberal imperialists, see Rao, The Empire Writes Back. For the
classic statement of the aspiration to draw on their own traditions and creativity rather than being
forced into the Western state form, see Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 31213, and more
recently, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
This point was raised of course by the former colonies as soon as they entered the United Nations, in
their demand for a New International Economic Order and for permanent sovereignty over their
resources. It was also raised by the Fourth World of Indigenous Peoples who still have no representation in international law. But these challenges were overridden by the great powers and the
structured inequality of the United Nations constitution. It was raised within international law
scholarship by Gerald Gong in 1984 before Koskenniemi, Simpson and Anghie in the early 2000s. See
Gerrit Gong, The Standard of Civilization in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
141
imperial actors and imperialised collaborators and resisters. It is the foundation of contemporary imperialism, laid in the colonial period and
strengthened during decolonisation. Informal imperialism would scarcely
work at all if these colonial foundations did not provide a historically
sedimented background structure of institutions and relations of domination within which the more flexible relations of informal imperialism are
exercised in the foreground.39
Secondly, the global governance critics place their hopes for the global
rule of law and democracy on the international institutions and laws
established after the Second World War to govern a post-colonial and
post-sovereign world. However, it is difficult to see how these institutions
and deformalised transnational legal regimes can be seen as an unproblematic basis for reforms that would lead to a non-imperial future. As I have
suggested, these legal and political institutions were created by the European
imperial powers and the United States at the end of the Second World War
to end the destructive wars of imperial competition (the two world wars), to
submit themselves to an international system of laws rather than separate
systems of imperial law and military competition, and to continue opening
the resources, labour and markets of the former colonies to free trade
competition in the expanding global market dominated by them.40
In American Empire, Neil Smith gives one of the best recent histories of
the rise to hegemony of the United States in this global field of public law
and political institutions. For him, the resurgence of US global influence
after 1945 is the second moment of the expansion of US informal imperialism (the first was the expansion from 1898 to the failure of the League of
Nations). This second moment failed to become global because it was
blocked by the socialist Second World and the defeat of the United States
in Vietnam. The third moment began with the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1989, the resurgence of US global power in the 1990s, and the successful
extension of informal neo-liberal imperialism around the globe, precisely by
means of these global institutions:
To the extent that the geography of the American century remains obscure, the
origins, outlines, possibilities, and limits of what today is called globalization will
remain obscure. There is no way to understand where the global shifts of the last
39
40
Mommsen, End of Empire; and from the World Systems perspective, Steven Sherman and Ganesh
K. Trichur, Empire and the Multitude: A Review Essay, Journal of World Systems Research 10(3),
2004: 81945.
Anghie, Imperialism, pp. 196235; Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New
World Order, 2nd edition (Toronto: Global Outlook, 2003); Shrybman, The World Trade
Organization.
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On imperialism
twenty years came from or where they will lead without understanding how,
throughout the twentieth century, U.S. corporate, political, and military power
mapped an emerging empire.41
The imperial character of the World Bank and the IMF can be seen in the
unequal power of the G8 states and transnational corporations; the policies
of structural adjustment they impose on subaltern states; the scandalous
increase in inequalities, debt and dependency of subaltern peoples in the
post-colonial period; and the continual direct and indirect military intervention to prop up repressive regimes and topple those who support local
democracy all in the name of freedom. 42
Alex Callinicos concludes from another perspective that it is nave to
think that these global institutions could be the basis of a non-imperial
alternative.43 My point is somewhat similar. Several features of the legal and
political institutions of the international system of states and the newer
institutions of global governances are part of contemporary imperialism, not
in any fleeting way, but, rather, the carefully designed instruments of the
exercise of informal hegemony over subaltern actors. The public law and
low-intensity democratic institutions of the non-European states were
imposed by the former colonial powers and modified and continued by
local, dependent elites during decolonisation and post-colonialism. They
are thus imperial in the traditional sense of being imposed on the people
who are subject to them rather than under their shared, democratic authority. The various regimes of public international and transnational law and
the corresponding global institutions that now govern the access of postcolonial peoples to their own resources, as well as their subalternised forms
41
42
43
See Smith, American Empire, pp. 425 (quote on p. 4). This is also roughly the chronology of
Bacevich, American Empire, which was published a little earlier, from a conservative perspective.
For a short introduction to these enduring features of the present world order, see James Petras and
Henry Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century (London: Zed Books,
2001); Jeremy Seabrook, The No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty (Toronto: New Internationalist,
2003); and Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (London: Allen Lane, 2002). For the
paramountcy of the great imperial powers in the WTO, which was introduced in 1995 as a form of
global governance, see Amrita Narlikar, The World Trade Organization: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest
of the Middle East (London: Fourth Estate, 2005), and Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present:
Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), show the seamless continuity between formal
colonial imperialism over the Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century and informal
imperialism in the second half, including the present Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Callinicos, Against the Third Way. See also the reply to David Helds recent formulation of
cosmopolitan democracy in Global Covenant, by Patrick Bond, Top Down or Bottom Up? A
Reply; and Helds response, What are the Dangers and Answers?: Clashes over Globalization,
both in Debating Globalization, eds. David Held, Anthony Barnett and Caspar Henderson
143
of political and economic arrangements, are also imperial in that they have
been developed without the former colonial peoples who are subject to
them (and subjectified by them) having an authoritative and effective
democratic say over them. These imperial features of existing public law
and practices of governance should not be the accepted ground of criticism
of imperialism, but the objects of sustained, democratic criticism by those
who are oppressed and exploited by them.44
4 kantian imperialism
I want to address the question of why the critics of the new imperialism do
not bring the system of states and global institutions into question and
examine them as constitutive features of contemporary imperialism. My
answer is that the basic language of description of the global order they
employ makes it very difficult to see these imperial features. Any language of
disclosure of an object domain reveals certain aspects of the phenomena it
brings to language at the expense of concealing other aspects. All languages
are aspectival in this sense. The language they use tends to conceal, and to
represent in non-imperial terms, precisely the imperial aspects of the present
that I have been trying to uncover and call into question. This would not be
so important if this language were just one among many used to discuss
the world order and its historical trajectory. But this is not the case. It is a
hegemonic language, not only of mainstream academic reflection on the
world order, but also of much of the public discussion, whether the public
work for or against the present world order, and whether their acceptance of
it is normative, pragmatic, or habitual.
This hegemonic language comprises three very general sub-languages and
their various iterations over the long imperial age: (1) a normative and
juridical language of an international system of constitutional states; (2)
a social-scientific language (and philosophy of history) of the systems
world-historical progress through stages of development from savagery to
civilisation, or through stages of modernisation; and (3) the language of
self-determination of peoples (which I discuss in section 6). Although the
first two languages have a variety of articulations in different traditions
of European and North American theory and policy, one of the most
44
In their recent introduction to globalisation, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2005), Jrgen Osterhammel and Niels Peterson go a considerable distance in
bringing the imperial features of globalisation back into the central debate. I discuss this section in
more detail in Chapter 7, this volume.
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On imperialism
influential and presumptively universal accounts of this normative ideal

and set of processes is given by Immanuel Kant in, respectively, Perpetual
Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) and Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784). I would like to use them as an exemplar of
the general kind of meta-narrative these two languages in their various
iterations narrate in different ways. Kants formulation gives particularly
clear and uncompromising expression to many of the central features of the
classic modern imperial meta-narrative (except for the third part of it, selfdetermination, which is grafted on to it during the decolonisation struggles
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).45
In these two short texts in practical philosophy, Kant combined two of
the most influential products of the European Enlightenment: a social
theory consisting of the stages of universal historical development of all
peoples and societies, with Europeans at the highest and most developed
stage; and a normative or juridical theory of the just and final ordering of all
people and societies that would come about at the end of the historical
development. It pictures a just and universal post-colonial world of identical, free and independent constitutional states under public international
law, opened to capitalism and free trade, and governed informally by a
league of the advanced states, that is nonetheless the particular historical
product of European colonial imperialism.
The normative theory is laid out in three definitive articles of Perpetual
Peace. Firstly, the only right ordering of all of humanity globally is the
gradual establishment of European-style, identical republican or constitutional states that legally recognise individuals as negatively free, formally
equal and substantively unequal, and dependent on a single system of laws
and representative government. Secondly, these republican constitutional
states are formally equal and sovereign, and they form a world system of
states subject to a set of universal international laws. The system of laws is
enforced by a league or federation of the most advanced European-style
45
I have discussed the various historical and contemporary formulations of this kind of story of
modernisation from Locke through the eighteenth century to the present in various works. For a recent
summary of the central imperial features of these ways of thinking about the world order as the
development of global modernity, see Mark Salter, Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations
(London: Pluto Press, 2002); and from a post-colonial perspective, Bill Aschcroft, Post-Colonial
Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 82104. Immanuel Kant situates his own imperial
narratives relative to the structure of other early-modern and Enlightenment narrative in Idea for a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, in Political Writings, pp. 513. For a more detailed
analysis, see Chapter 1, this volume, and Tully, Strange Multiplicity. The theories of Hegel, Marx and
Mill could be used to illustrate a similar narrative structure of the two languages, with, of course, specific
internal variations, as Salter and others have shown. I choose Kants because it his particular fusion of
developmental and juridical universalism that has become so influential since 1945.
145
states that use primarily financial power, and military power if needed, to
protect their members and bring other, less-developed and formerly colonised states into the federation over time. Thirdly, each state has a duty of
cosmopolitan hospitality to open its borders to the cosmopolitan right of
voluntary commerce and free trade of other nations, even if the imperial
powers initially abuse this right, as Kant acknowledges they do. This duty is
enforceable by the league.46 Finally, although constitutional states cannot
intervene in other constitutional states unless they break down or close their
doors to free trade, Kant emphasises in no uncertain terms that the league,
or any single constitutional state, has the right to intervene militarily in any
society that has not reached the state of a civil constitution of European
states, which is thus by definition posited as in a lawless state of nature, and
to impose a Western-style constitutional order on it.47
The social theory of universal historical development in the earlier
Universal History explains how this normative order gradually comes into
being over the centuries. Development is guaranteed by nature, which
works through the unintended consequences of competition of individuals
and states; what Kant calls asocial sociability. The main form of asocial
sociability used by nature to develop the capacities of the human species
towards a world system of states and perpetual peace is warfare:
Wars, tense and unremitting military preparations, and the resultant distress which
every state must eventually feel within itself, even in the midst of peace these are
the means by which nature drives nations to make initially imperfect attempts, but
finally, after many devastations, upheavals and even complete inner exhaustion of
their powers, to take the step which reason could have suggested to them without so
many sad experiences that of abandoning the lawless state of savagery and
entering a federation of peoples in which every state, even the smallest, could
expect to derive its security.48
As he explains in systematic detail in the First Supplement to Perpetual

Peace, nature works especially through the unjust wars of expansion in order
to, firstly, spread people around the planet, moving the lower and savage
peoples to more inhospitable climates as they move them off their traditional territories. Subsequently, Europeans spread and impose European
46
47
48
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, in Political Writings, pp. 99108. There is
a fair degree of indeterminacy in all three universal articles in Kants various formulations in different
texts and so in the interpretation of them over the last two hundred years in different circumstances. I
suspect that this indeterminacy and ambiguity is part of the explanation of its continuing hold on the
modern imagination that it shaped so profoundly.
Ibid., p. 98, introductory note to the three definitive articles.
Kant, Universal History, in Political Writings, p. 47.
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On imperialism
law by means of imperial wars and colonisation. And finally, they spread
commerce, an ethos of competitive individualism, and the pacifying relations of free trade and economic interdependency to the rest of the world.49
These three features then lead to more wars of competition and development, but they gradually lead to the formation of the league to resolve wars
among states, first among European states. These processes lead to the gradual
replacement of military competition among states by economic competition,
which is spread by cosmopolitan right and mutual self-interest, so that the
spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people.50 These three
natural globalising processes work along with the right of the league to
intervene militarily in pre-constitutional states, or in constitutional states that
break down into anarchy, violate contract law, or close their doors to foreign
commerce, and impose a civil constitution on them. But the preferred
instrument of the league is the use of economic sanctions once states are
subject to global economic interdependency.51 These processes move the
world progressively towards the normative ideal of identical constitutional
states, bound together by commerce and universal public international laws,
and governed by the league of united states. That is, the natural mechanism
described in the developmental social theory guarantees the progress
towards the normative telos:
In this way, nature guarantees perpetual peace by the actual mechanism of human
inclinations [asocial sociability]. And while the likelihood of its being attained is
not sufficient to enable us to prophesy the future theoretically, it is enough for
practical purposes. It makes it our duty to work our way towards this goal, which is
more than an empty chimera.52
As we can see from this remarkably influential picture of world-historical

development and normative universalism, the period of European colonial
imperialism is an absolutely necessary stage in the development of the
human species towards the end-state of a world system of European-style
states bound together by global economic relations and international law
49
50
51
52
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Political Writings, pp. 10814. This is repeated from Universal History,
where he explains that Europeans will probably legislate for all other continents, Political Writings,
p. 52.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Political Writings, p. 114.
Ibid., pp. 96, 98. For the leagues (or a single states) defence of contracts against unjust enemies who
violate them, see Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 60 (6: 349), in Practical Philosophy,
ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 4867.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Political Writings, p. 114. This duty to work towards the Europeanisation of
the globe is performed by exchanging public reasons about public policy in accordance with this
normative and developmental framework (Perpetual Peace, in Political Writings, pp. 11415; further
explained in Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?).
147
and governed by a league of states exercising post-colonial informal imperial

rule. Although European colonial imperialism is necessary, its actual, excessively violent wars cannot be justified in terms of Kants three universal
principles. As we have seen, Europeans are perfectly justified in coercively
imposing Western law on non-Europeans if they fail to submit voluntarily
to Western colonial law or to move off their traditional territories when the
colonisers arrive, but Kant roundly condemns the excessive violence of
European expansion as unjust and inhospitable.53 Even though it is unjust,
it is necessary: it is the means by which nature herself raises humans up
the stages of historical development. Unlike utilitarian defenders of imperialism, the ends never justify the excessively violent means for the deontological Kant.54 Nature does what is necessary through humans unjust
actions.55
Next, although the excessive violence of European imperial expansion is
unjust, it cannot be resisted. According to Kant, there is an absolute duty to
obey the law, no matter how unjust it may be or how unjust its original
imposition. It is even a duty not to look into the origins of a colonial state,
let alone resist it. The unjust foundations of any state, colonial or not, or of
the imperial world order itself, cannot be enquired into with a view to
challenging either, or revolting against them, no matter how violently they
are imposed or how intolerably unjust they may be in the present.56 The
questions of whether the people agreed to the fundamental constitution
and sovereign authority are completely futile arguments and a menace to
the state.57 The absolute acceptance of the imperial foundations of the
European-imposed world order and the absolute duty not to resist this order,
by a group within a state or a state within the system, constitute an idea
expressed as a practical principle of reason, requiring men to obey the
legislative authority now in power, irrespective of its origin.58 Each state
has the right to crush a rebellion within a state and the league the right to
53
54
55
56
57
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Political Writings, pp. 1068.

Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, in Political Writings, p. 173. For Kant, humans can be expected to
exercise coercion within the bounds of his moral system only once they have reached the higher end of
the stages of development. They are civilized but not yet moral, so they will in fact act unjustly in
conquering the non-European world and constructing it in accord with his legal and political plan.
Kant, Universal History, in Political Writings, p. 49.
Marx presents a somewhat similar argument that the wars of imperial expansion are unjust but
necessary in his writings on India. More recently, Max Boot has presented a similar argument in The
Savage Wars of Peace. This influential liberal defence of US imperialism is a history of US wars of
intervention since 1890 and an exhortation to see them as savage yet necessary to economic freedom,
progress and eventual peace among all liberal democratic states.
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, in Political Writings, pp. 1435, 162, 173, 175.
Ibid., p. 143. 58 Ibid.
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On imperialism
intervene if the rebellion gets out of control.59 The reason for this conclusion is that unsociable humans must have the law coercively imposed
upon them by a master in order to establish the basis for the development of
a lawful and rightful order in the first place.60 Just resistance to the law or
the sovereign authority, even against the most intolerable misuse of
supreme power, is thus self-contradictory.61 Resistance to the coercive
imposition of the law just shows that the resisters are exercising their asocial
lawless freedom: that is, their antagonistic dispositions have not yet been
sufficiently socialised and moralised into commercial and other forms of
individualistic competitiveness within the imposed legal structure of the
three definitive articles.62
In summary, Kant combined two very powerful imperial stories: a
presumptively universal and Eurocentric narrative of historical development or modernisation and a presumptively universal and Eurocentric
juridical theory of global justice. The Kantian theory or meta-narrative is
imperial in the classically modern sense. Firstly, while it does not justify the
excessive violence and pillage of European colonial imperialism and of the
on-going remaking of the world in the political, legal and economic image
of European state formation (even one particular image of it), it is presented
as the universally necessary and irresistible path of development and modernisation. Secondly, it presents the post-colonial phase of development as a
universal system of formally identical European state forms, abstracted from
their continuing colonial relations of historical construction, deepening
dependency and substantive inequality, and as a system of informal imperial
rule through the league, in a completely non-imperial vocabulary. It redescribes and occludes in these formal and abstract terms precisely the
imperial features of the present that I have tried to recover in the previous
sections. Thirdly, this particular story of progress and its goal are presented
not only as universal and necessary, but also as obligatory; as something all
rational human beings have a duty to work towards.
Fourthly, precisely because it is presented as universal, necessary and
obligatory (that is, as a meta-narrative), it cannot recognise and respect any
other of the plurality of narratives, traditions or civilisations as equal yet
59
60
61
62
Ibid., pp. 1435; Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Political Writings, pp. 105, 114.
Kant, Universal History, in Political Writings, pp. 456.
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, in Political Writings, p. 145.
See Kant, Universal History, p. 46, and Perpetual Peace, p. 113, both in Political Writings, where he
explains that moral behaviour follows after an established constitutional order. See his remarks on the
so-called lawless freedom of Indigenous peoples as the exemplar of unjust and regressive resistance to
the external imposition of law (pp. 1023); and Tully, Strange Multiplicity, pp. 7982.
149
different, and enter into a dialogue with them on equal footing. Rather, it
always already captures other peoples (and their legal and political civilisations) in its own presumptively universal categories: as either identical to
European constitutional states, and so friends of peace and freedom; or
lower peoples somewhere down the developmental ladder (from barbarism to culture and morality), and thus subject to imperial rule in some
form or another. The moral and rational capacities of lower peoples are
less developed than the universalising rationalists and moralists at the
higher stage.63 The person who adopts this meta-narrative, as Kants
pupil Johann Herder put it in response, cannot approach another peoples
way of life as an alternative horizon, thereby throwing their own into
question and experiencing human finitude and plurality, the beginning of
insight and cross-cultural understanding. Rather, the exchange of public
reasons takes place within this allegedly universal, necessary and obligatory world-view.64
5 neo-kantian imperialism
We are all familiar with how this dual language of universal norms and
historical processes has been adopted and adapted in the Liberal and
Marxist traditions, the social sciences, developmental studies, the policy
communities of developed and developing states, international law, the
League of Nations and the United Nations, and, as I have suggested, in
the description and exercise of US informal imperialism over the twentieth
63
64
Kant depicts hunting and gathering Indigenous peoples (lawless savages) and the pastoral peoples
(their existence scarcely more valuable than that of their animals) at the lawless lowest stage and
his contemporary Europeans as barely halfway up the ladder: civilised but not yet moral (Kant,
Universal History, in Political Writings, pp. 45, 479).
Johann Herder, Kants pupil, presented scathing criticisms of Kants imperialism; see F. M. Barnard,
Herder on Nationality, Humanity and History (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003).
For Burkes criticisms, see Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century
British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For Hans-Georg Gadamers
classic criticism of Kantian universalism as monological and closed to the other, see Truth and Method
(New York: Continuum, 1999), pp. 34662. There is now a vast literature on Kants imperialism and
racism. See Robert Bernasconi, Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism, in Philosophers on Race:
Critical Essays, eds. Julie Ward and Tommy Lott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Brett Bowden, In the
Name of Progress and Peace: The Standard of Civilization and the Universalizing Project,
Alternatives 29(1), 2004: 4368; Thomas McCarthy, On the Way to a World Republic: Kant on
Race and Development, in Politik, Moral und Religion: Gegenstze und Ergnzungen, ed. Lothar
Waas (Duncker and Humblot Verlag, 2004); Barry Hindess, The Very Idea of Universal History
(unpublished paper presented at University of Victoria, 2005); Michael Murphy, Civilizationism
(paper presented at the First Nations Second Thoughts Conference, University of Edinburgh, 2005);
Anghie, Imperialism, pp. 2958.
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On imperialism
century.65 One of the most influential post-Cold War reformulations of it,

drawing explicitly on Kant, was presented by Francis Fukuyama in 1992.66
By early 2005 it had clearly attained hegemonic status.67
The neo-Kantians today argue that they have made three major changes
to the original Kantian story while retaining its universal, necessary and
obligatory character. (1) They now see the so-called processes of historical
development and modernisation as dialectical rather than linear, yet still
leading in a general way to a similar general universal normative endpoint.68 The processes continue to promote the conditions of peace, yet
they also make its attainment more difficult. Furthermore, modernisation is
not imposed unilaterally onto a receptive non-European world, but is
dialectical in the sense that non-European peoples interact with these
processes and modify them somewhat, making the overall direction less
linear. A somewhat similar change has occurred in imperialism studies since
the Second World War; from unilateral accounts of imperial domination to
more interactive and agonistic accounts of hegemonsubaltern relationships, yet without the Kantian faith that Western imperialism leads to
peace.69
(2) Kants account of sovereignty has been modified to some extent by
globalisation and multilayered global governance through the Bretton Woods
institutions, changes in international law, the rise of powerful multinational
corporations and the role of soft-norm creation by NGOs.70 This has given
rise to a more differential and polycentric form of global rule. However, they
do not describe this as informal imperialism as I have done. As I mentioned
65
66
67
68
69
70
For the global spread of these two languages over the last two centuries, see Vincent Tucker, The
Myth of Development: A Critique of a Eurocentric Discourse, in Critical Development Theory:
Contributions to a New Paradigm, eds. Ronaldo Munck and Denis OHearn (London: Zed Books,
1999); Ronaldo Munck, Deconstructing Development Discourses: Of Impasses, Alternatives, and
Politics, in Critical Development Theory; Salter, Barbarians; and Rist, The History of Development.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992).
For a graphic illustration of its broad and enthusiastic endorsement, see Fukuyama was Right: Weve
Come a Long Way, The Globe and Mail, 1 January 2005: A14.
James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachman, Introduction, in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kants
Cosmopolitan Ideal, eds. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1997). The Introduction is a summary of the main themes presented in the chapters of the volume.
Ibid., pp. 912. For the change in imperialism studies, see Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism,
pp. 70141. For a critical survey and refutation of the neo-Kantian thesis of progress to democratic
peace, see Andrew Lawrence, Peace of Imperial Method?: Skeptical Inquiries into Ambiguous
Evidence for the Democratic Peace, in Political Knowledge and Social Inquiry, eds. Richard Ned
Lebow and Mark Lichbach (New York: Palgrave, 2007).
Bohman and Lutz-Bachman, Introduction, in Perpetual Peace, pp. 1215. This modification is
deeply indebted to the scholarship of David Held (see Cosmopolitan Democracy and Global Order:
A New Agenda, in Perpetual Peace).
151
in the Introduction, they present this form of rule as non-imperial by

contrasting it with a centralised world empire, as if this is the only form of
imperialism, just exactly as Kant does, in contrasting his league with a world
state-empire.71
(3) They argue that neo-Kantian universalism is more open to pluralism
and democratic deliberation over the norms of association than Kants
view that all states must be identical in constitutional form. However, all
other civilisations and traditions are characterised as particulars within the
general or universal framework of Kants three definitive articles (the
foundational cosmopolitan public law). In so far as their members can
democratically negotiate some form of minority recognition within this
global empire (and this varies among the authors), they must do so within a
presumptively universal framework for the exchange of public reasons over
the norms of association (discourse ethics).72
In summary, these three modifications change the internal composition
of the Kantian language to bring it in line with post-colonial informal
imperialism and its dispersed institutions, international laws and particularities, while retaining its overall imperial character for the four reasons
outlined in section 4.73 In addition, the Kantian and neo-Kantian languages
71
72
73
Bohman and Lutz-Bachman, Introduction, in Perpetual Peace, p. 14; Kant, Perpetual Peace, in
Political Writings, pp. 1023. Kant changed his mind on this, seeing the league as a kind of negative
surrogate for a world government that he seemed to have endorsed earlier. Habermas is one of the few
neo-Kantians in the volume to argue for a kind of world republic at the UN to enforce international
human rights: see Jrgen Habermas, Kants Idea of Perpetual Peace with the Benefit of Two
Hundred Years Hindsight, in Perpetual Peace: and note 73 below.
Bohman and Lutz-Bachman, Introduction, in Perpetual Peace, pp. 1518. In recent works, such as
Global Covenant, David Held is particularly concerned to draw a sharp boundary around cultural
rights, drawing more than before on Brian Barrys liberalism. And Axel Honneth, in his exchange
with Nancy Fraser, has argued against the recognition of cultural or legal diversity and for the
integration and individuation of humanity into his formulation of the neo-Kantian universal
framework: Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Recognition or Redistribution: A Political-Philosophical
Exchange (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 16089.
Both Habermas and Honneth attempt to respond to objections that the neo-Kantian global project is
imperial in their chapters in the volume. They do not address the four reasons presented here. For a
recent statement of my fourth reason, see Bruno Latour, Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?
Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck, Common Knowledge 10(3), 2004: 45063. For the
failure of this general approach to recognise and accommodate democratic pluralism within states, let
alone among different political societies, see Stephen Tierney, Constitutional Law and National
Pluralism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For the argument that this kind of approach
fails to take into account a democratically grounded legal and political pluralism beyond the state, see
Walker, The Idea of Constitutional Pluralism; and Vito Breda, A European Constitution in a
Multinational Europe or a Multinational Constitution for Europe?, European Law Journal 12(3),
2006: 33044. For objections to Habermas imperialistic formulation of the constitutionalisation of
international law in Der gespaltene Westen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004) and The
Kantian Project, see Neil Walker, Making a World of Difference: Habermas, Cosmopolitanism and
the Constitutionalization of International Law, in Multiculturalism and the Law.
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On imperialism
both have a tendency to serve to justify imperialism in practice when they

are adopted as the language of foreign policy in the context of deformalised
international law. During the Cold War, Hans Morgenthau argued that it
could not but lead to a pax Americana or American Imperium in which the
political interests and legal values of the United States are identified with
universal values.74 Koskenniemi argues that the neo-Kantian project today
has the same consequence in practice, leading either to a rational imperialism, where the decision-maker identifies his or her preferences with the
abstract, universal values of the meta-narrative (moral and just) and others
with mere preferences (the ethics of a particular community), or to a
cynical imperialism, where the decision-maker does not identify his or
her preferences with universal values, but, having no alternative for justifying his or her actions, acts as if they are.75
6 the fourth critics: self-determination,
democratisation and imperialism
The fourth set of critics see the length and breadth of informal imperialism
and often the layers of imperial relationships laid down during the age of
colonial imperialism. In response, they argue that the language and
practice of popular sovereignty or the self-determination of peoples and
democracy offer a genuinely non-imperial and anti-imperial alternative. If
subaltern peoples and Indigenous peoples could only exercise their right of
self-determination, through international law and reform of the UN or
through revolution and liberation, they would free themselves from
European and American imperialism. This view is widely expressed in
the South and the Third World. It is also advanced in a modified way by
critical international law theorists, who see the new democratic norm of
international law (and the right to democracy) as the extension of the
right of self-determination. On this view, a state would be recognised
under international law only if it were democratic, or democratising,
and if it recognised the right of self-determination for any peoples within
its territory. To be able to exercise the powers of self-determination or to
74
75
In Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer, p. 482.

Ibid., pp. 48393. He argues that the theories of both Habermas and Rawls are imperial in this
pragmatic sense. For the view that Rawls The Law of Peoples is a justification of US imperial foreign
policy, see Jeffrey Paris, After Rawls, Social Theory and Practice 28(4), 2002: 67999. For similar
objections, see Bond, Top Down or Bottom Up?; Deppe, Habermas Manifesto; and Benjamin
Barber, Global Governance from Below, in Debating Globalization.
153
be able to organise as a democracy is to be free of imperialism on this

view.76
Unfortunately, these two theses do not stand up to scrutiny. The
protection of self-determination and democratic government under international law and the exercise of powers of self-determination and democratic self-rule are internal to informal post-colonial imperialism, at least in
their present form. They are literally the two main ways by which the
conduct of subaltern states is governed by informal imperial rule: that is,
through supporting, channelling and constraining their self-determining
and democratic freedoms.
During the early years of decolonisation, one of the first leaders to see the
internal relation between informal imperial rule, self-determination and
democratisation was Woodrow Wilson. He argued that most colonised
peoples should be able to exercise the right of self-determination and democratic self-rule, but that the more advanced democratic states had the
responsibility to educate the elites, train the military and intervene militarily
from time to time to guide the self-determination of former colonial peoples
along its proper stages of development to openness to free trade and Westernstyle democratisation.77 The United States was the world leader in this form
of enlightened rule because of its long experience of this kind of rule by
means of the Monroe Doctrine over the former colonies of Central and South
America. The United States also had the responsibility to intervene militarily
to protect the decolonising peoples from their two main foes: the old
European colonial powers who claimed the colonies as their closed spheres
of influence and the reactionary internal leaders and movements who tried
to close their economies to foreign domination and build up economic and
democratic self-reliance through controlled trade (as the United States has
always done in its own case).78 In this way, Wilson was able to respond to the
demands for self-determination of colonised peoples, except for the
Indigenous peoples of the Fourth World,79 yet to channel informally their
76
77
78
79
This is the third sub-language that I mentioned in section 4. The language of self-rule and selfdetermination has a long and complex history in Europe and the Third World prior to and in relation
to the developmental and normative languages that Kant combined.
This responsibility of the more advanced states to guide the former colonies in their exercise of selfdetermination was a continuation of the nineteenth-century duty to civilize and its application in
the Mandate System of the League of Nations (Anghie, Imperialism, pp. 24568).
Woodrow Wilson, An Address to the Senate, January 22, 1917, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson,
Vol. XL, ed. Arthur Stanley Link (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). See Bacevich,
American Empire, pp. 11415.
See Volume I, Chapter 8; and J. Anthony Hall, The American Empire and the Fourth World (Montreal:
McGill-Queens University Press, 2003).
154
On imperialism
exercise of self-determination into state-building and economic development

within the existing imperial system. Of course, the granting of the right
of self-determination to colonised peoples was a repudiation of Kants nonresistance theory. However, it provided a normative justification and
explanation from another Western tradition popular sovereignty and
self-determination for the transition from colonialism to post-colonialism,
something Kants theory did not provide, while retaining the constitutive
features of Kants two normative-juridical and developmental-historical languages. Moreover, Wilson expressed the right of self-determination and the
responsibility of informal imperial guidance in terms of the distinctive US
tradition of the Monroe Doctrine, its corollaries, the doctrine of opening
doors to free trade and democracy, and the ever-expanding frontiers.80 In
Chalmers Johnsons words:
Wilson provided an idealistic grounding for American imperialism, what in our
own time would become a global mission to democratize the world. More than
any other figure, he provided the intellectual foundations for an interventionist
foreign policy, expressed in humanitarian and democratic rhetoric. Wilson remains
the godfather of those contemporary ideologists who justify American power in
terms of exporting democracy.81
Major-General Smedley Butler, the famous marine in charge of implementing the Wilsonian doctrine of military intervention and self-determination,
called it by its more familiar name, gangster capitalism:
I spent 33 years and four months in active service I served in all commissioned
ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that time, I spent
most of my time being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street
and the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism I helped
make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped
make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect
80
81
As I mentioned earlier, Wilson saw no contradiction in combining self-determination and democratisation with continual informal imperial intervention (military, economic and educational). William
A. Williams presented this as the great contradiction in the Wilson doctrine a generation ago, but the
present generation of US historians agree on the accordance of Wilsons writings and later US policy:
that is, of what Andrew Bacevich calls a grand strategy of freedom as openness to free trade
dominated by US economic and military power (American Empire, pp. 4651, 11516). For the
nineteenth-century development of this tradition on which Wilson drew, see the classic study of
Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansion in American History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935). For the role of wars against Native Americans
(Kants lawless savages) in the development of this tradition and military intervention up to Wilson
and to the war in Vietnam, see Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and
Empire Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980).
Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, p. 51. As Weinberg shows, the policy of democratising the world and
acting as a global policeman predates Wilson.
155
revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for
the benefit of Wall Street I helped to purify Nicaragua for the international
banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909 1912. I brought light to the Dominican
Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see that
Standard Oil went its way unmolested.82
At the same time, decolonising elites and radicals in the former colonies
adopted the language of self-determination to justify decolonisation and
polity-building, but they were constrained by the plenitude of overt and
covert means of informal imperialism and the deeper dependency relations
that continued through decolonisation to exercise their political, legal and
economic powers in accord with the latest versions of the developmental
and normative sub-languages of the shared narrative of modernisation.
Far from [Benedict] Andersons image of peoples whose inchoate dreams finally
found form in nationalism, the social and political movements of the decolonized
nation states have been highly various in their dreams, and have been repeatedly
forced to attempt to fit their dreams and goals into the limits of the nation state
form, to become nations or parts of a nation, content with local sovereignty and the
project of national development.83
Throughout the Cold War, this way of governing the former colonies
through the guided exercise of self-determination was extended to the fight
against communist and socialist movements from Franklin Roosevelt
and Truman to Kennedy and Johnson. Today, a very similar tripartite
language is employed. The league or coalition of the United States and
its allies is said to bring free trade and democratisation, to support the
self-determination of peoples subject to tyranny and closed societies by
military intervention and economic sanctions against failed, rogue or
outlaw states.84
82
83
84
Smedley Butler, On Interventionism [1933], available at: www.fas.org/man/smedley.htm [Accessed

15 March 2006].
Kelly and Kaplan, My Ambition is Much Higher than Independence, p. 142. See also William R.
Louis and Ronald Robinson, Empire Prevervd: How the Americans Put Anti-Communism Before
Anti-Imperialism, in Decolonization; and Michael Adas, Contested Hegemony: The Great War and
the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission, in Decolonization, for the spread of the languages of
developmental and self-determination throughout the Third World. This collection contains an
excellent set of case studies on the co-constitution of self-determination, democratisation and
informal imperialism. For the military, economic and educational means employed to exercise
informal imperial power, see William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since
World War II, 2nd edition (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004).
This is the main thesis of Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States. The National Security Strategy of
the United States of America (2002) is a now classic formulation of this US global strategy of military
intervention and the extension of bases around the world all for the sake of market freedom, openness
and imposed democratisation throughout the world and against its latest enemies (section 2 above).
156
On imperialism
The kind of imposed or constrained democracy that is developed in these

relationships of self-determination and dependency is not only unstable
(as we saw in section 3), but also low-intensity democracy. This is a form of
elite representative democracy dependent on foreign economic and military
relations, and in tension with the more participatory democratic aspirations
of the majority of the population. As the authors who introduced this term
state: By invoking the American counter-insurgency catch-phrase Low
Intensity Conflict, it is our intention to show that perhaps more than in
any time in the recent past, it is now that the struggle to define democracy
has become a major ideological battle.85 Area scholars of recent global
governance, democratisation and the creation of civil societies by the WB,
IMF, transnational corporations and many aid agencies have shown that the
imperial civilising project of opening the former colonies to free trade,
labour discipline and market-oriented individual behaviour (from the old
indirect colonial rule through the beginnings of controlled self-rule under
the Mandate System to decolonisation) continues apace today.86
A related trend appears to exist in international law. A norm of democratic governance was introduced by Thomas Franck and Anne-Marie
Burley (Slaughter) towards the end of the Cold War enjoining that a state
should be recognised only if its internal constitution is liberal-democratic
and based on popular sovereignty. Franck, somewhat like Fukuyama,
argues that this international norm is emerging out of self-determination,
decolonisation, human rights and the criterion that elections lend legitimacy, and is almost universally celebrated. In addition, it is a norm that
expressly opens the stagnant political economies of states to economic,
social and cultural, as well as political, development.87 In short, it is a neoKantian reformulation of Kants three definitive articles and developmental
theory, with the addition of the constrained right of self-determination
and the Wilsonian language of freedom as openness to global markets.
85
86
87
Although the document failed to mention the support and guidance of self-determination, this was
quickly remedied in the Presidents 2003 address on the support the war in Iraq was giving to Iraqi
self-determination: Iraqi Democracy will Succeed (11 June 2003) (as transcribed by FDCH e-media
Inc.), available at: www.nytimes.com/2003/11/06/politics/o0TEXT-BUSH.html. These long-standing
imperial themes were repeated in his second acceptance speech in 2004.
Gills, Rocamora and Wilson, Low Intensity Democracy, p. 52. Their general thesis is based on
studies of Guatemala, Argentina, the Philippines, Korea, Chile, Nicaragua and Haiti.
See Alison Ayers, Demystifying Democratization: The Global Constitution of (Neo)Liberal Polities
in Africa, Third World Quarterly 27(2), 2006: 31238, for a detailed empirical and theoretical study of
informal imperialism in a number of African states today.
Thomas Franck, The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance, American Journal of International
Law 86(1), 1992: 4691.
157
Anne-Marie Burley (Slaughter) explicitly draws the connection to Kant and

states the universal norm of legitimacy in the following imperial way:
[Liberal democratic states] are defined broadly as states with juridical equality,
constitutional protection of individual rights, representative republican govern
ments, and market economies based on private property rights. Non liberal states,
by contrast, are defined as those states lacking these characteristics.88
In her fascinating study of the emergence of this norm of informal neoliberal imperialism, Susan Marks goes on to show how social-democratic
neo-Kantians, discussed above, develop their theories out of the same
tradition but deepen the narrow commitment to low-intensity democracy of neo-liberal imperialism.89 If I may put it this way, these two wings of
liberal-democratic international law replicate the two wings of informal US
imperialism.
After criticising the cosmopolitan democrats for a self-limiting definition
of global democratisation, Marks argues for extending the norm of democratisation further by deepening the commitment to democratic inclusiveness. However, this critical response would have to take into account the
underlying imperial features of the state and international system in which
peoples would be included if it were to avoid assimilation and subordination. Imperialism will not be challenged by simply extending the paramount forms of neo-liberal or social-democratic representative democracy,
for they are imposed forms, and they are controlled indirectly by the
techniques of informal imperialism. Rather, by promoting diverse highintensity forms of local and global democracy, self-determination and legal
pluralism enlightened world leaders would enable the people subject to
these low-intensity structures of law and politics to bring them under their
shared democratic authority, without the current impoverishing and disempowering forms of dependency and threats of intervention.90
88
89
90
Anne-Marie Burley, Law Among Liberal States: Liberal Internationalism and the Act of State
Doctrine, Columbia Law Review 92(8), 1992: 190796, 1909.
Susan Marks, The Riddle of All Constitutions: International Law, Democracy, and the Critique of
Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). While she is critical of the cosmopolitan democrats, she does not call their form of neo-Kantianism imperial, even though it has the imperial
characteristics of neo-liberal imperialism. She sees the emergence of the democratic norm as something new, in contrast to the norm that a state should be recognised independently of its constitution.
But the Kantian tradition has always had a civic constitution criterion of statehood and has defined
non-states, in contrast, as Kant does. In fact, the liberal imperialists of the interwar years anticipated
this norm of liberal democratic orthodoxy in many respects (Morefield, Covenants Without Swords).
For a similar criticism of the norm of liberal democracy in international law, see Jose E. Alvarez, Do
Liberal States Behave Better? A Critique of Slaughters Liberal Theory, European Journal of
International Law 12(2), 2001: 183246.
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On imperialism
In summary, the dominant forms of representative democracy, selfdetermination and democratisation promoted through international law
are not alternatives to imperialism, but, rather, the means through which
informal imperialism operates against the wishes of the majority of the
population of the post-colonial world.91 The genuinely non-imperial alternatives are more broadly participatory or high-intensity democratic forms
of democracy and self-determination that either draw on persisting nonimperial legal and political practices and traditions or create new ones.
7 the fifth critics: post-colonialism, legal
constructivism and interactive imperialism
The final set of critics I wish to discuss are the post-colonial critics of
imperialism. Drawing on and extending the later work of Edward Said in
Culture and Imperialism and the later work of Michel Foucault in The
Subject and Power, they share much of the critical analysis I have presented
above. They start from the premise that humans are field beings, always
already in relationships of meaning, power and modes of relational subjectivity; and they see themselves as writing and acting within and against
the specific fields of informal imperial relationships of meaning, power and
subjectification among hegemonic and subaltern actors.92
They argue that imperial relationships are not unilaterally and monologically imposed on passive subjects who submit to the logic of capitalist
development and Western juridification, as the Kantian narrative
91
92
See the Introduction to Gills, Rocamora and Wilson, Low Intensity Democracy; and Seabrook, The
No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty.
For a general survey of post-colonial writing on imperialism, see Ashcroft, Post-Colonial
Transformation. For a succinct statement of the post-colonial approach to international relations
and international law, see Taraki Barkawi and Mark Laffey, Retrieving the Imperial: Empire and
International Relations, Millennium 31(1), 2002: 10927. I also take the legal constructivists,
represented by Stephen Toope, Martha Finnemore, Jutta Brunne and Antje Wiener in international
law; and Neil Walker, Emilios Christodoulidis, Jo Shaw and Stephen Tierney in European public
law, to share many of the features of post-colonial analysis, even though they have not addressed the
question of whether the field of study is imperial. That is, they understand domestic, transnational
and international law to be a network of relationships among unequally situated subjects of law
(hegemons and subalterns of various kinds) who are able (to unequal extents) to negotiate and modify
the laws to which they are subject en passant. Martha Finnemore and Stephen Toope, Alternatives to
Legalization: Richer Views of Law and Politics, International Organization 55(3), 2001: 74358;
Antje Wiener, The Dual Quality of Norms and Governance Beyond the State: Sociological and
Normative Approaches to Interaction, Critical Review of International, Social and Political Philosophy
10(1), 2007: 4769; Walker, The Idea of Constitutional Pluralism; Emilios Christodoulidis,
Constitutional Irresolution: Law and the Framing of Civil Society, European Law Journal 9(4),
2003: 40132; Jo Shaw, Postnational Constitutionalism; Tierney, Constitutional Law.
159
prescribes. Rather, like the theorists of interactive and excentric imperialism, they see imperial relationships as agonistic and, to a large extent,
mutually constitutive. That is, hegemonic imperial actors and their legal
and political institutions and instruments of informal rule, and the
corresponding subaltern actors are mutually constituted by the historical
interactions among them; from the initial rise of the West and the subalternisation of the colonial world out of the dispossession and exploitation
of their resources and the resistances internal to these processes, down to the
complex field of interaction today.93
Post-colonial critics are also critical of the theories of self-determination
and liberation of the decolonising period in much the same way as I have been
above. They argue that these narratives of decolonisation and liberation
occlude the emergence of informal imperialism and, moreover, reproduce the
great script of subject/sovereign doubles of the Western tradition, rendering
post-colonial subjects conscripts of modernity.94 Further, they suggest that
there is no unified self, either hegemon or subaltern, who could stand
outside the fields of linguistic, legal, political, economic, military and cultural
relations in which we find ourselves and determine the relations that bear us,
as the self-determination narrative presupposes. Hegemon and subaltern
are multiplex: dispersed across complex, criss-crossing and overlapping fields
of unequal and mutually constitutive relationships of interplay. They are not
conveniently located in the West and the non-West or the North and South,
but within and across these binary categories of colonial geography,95 dividing
subaltern (and hegemonic) societies into complex hegemonicsubaltern
classes and ethnicities, and often mobilising local pre-colonisation relationships of imperialism, quasi-imperialism and resistance.96
For post-colonial critics, the central feature of these multiple relationships of informal imperialism is the interaction or agonism between hegemons and subalterns. One of the discoveries of twentieth-century theorists
and policy makers of both rule and resistance is that the subject (individual
93
94
95
96
Eric Wolf, in Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982),
was one of the first to put world history in this way, although he drew heavily on earlier interactive
accounts, such as those of Rosa Luxembourg and Eric Williams.
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004). See also Edward Saids development of these two criticisms in Culture and
Imperialism. For a brief summary, see Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, pp. 118.
Stephen Flusty, De-Coca-Colonization: Making the Globe from the Inside Out (London: Routledge,
2004); Tully, Strange Multiplicity.
Taraki Barkawi and Mark Laffey argue that this thesis is a constitutive feature of Chomskys analysis
of imperialism as well (note 88).
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On imperialism
or group) is more effectively and economically governed through his or her

own freedom his or her own participation in relations of governance of
production, consumption, militarisation, securitisation, leisure and so on
by incorporating degrees of subaltern legality (customary law), democracy
and self-determination into informal and indirect modes of governance of
political and economic life. As we have seen in the previous section, this
invention in the realm of governance developed out of indirect colonial rule
and decolonisation and then spread to neo-liberal modes of governance
domestically and globally.97
The implication of this for post-colonial writers is that there is always a
limited range of possible ways of exercising ones freedom in accordance
with the rules of any practice of governance following the rules as closely
as possible, acting differently, trying to modify them to some extent
overtly or covertly, seeking to call them into question and negotiate
them with the powers that be in the corresponding legal and political
institutions, and, at the limit, confronting them directly in the recourse to
non-violent or violent revolt. (From this perspective, the great theories of
self-determination and independence focused on one type of revolt to the
exclusion of all the other possible practices of freedom available to subaltern actors.)98
Thus, instead of being seen as the passive constructs of imperial processes
of interpellation, as in Louis Althussers account, subaltern subjects are
seen, extending Said and Foucault, as interpolators, writing and acting
back in a multiplicity of ways within fields of discursive and non-discursive
relationships.99 While subalterns are constrained to act tactically in these
ways, because of their unequal and subordinate position, hegemons act
strategically. Hegemons try to structure the field of possible responses.
They try to induce, train, encourage, fund, bribe, persuade, channel, threaten
and constrain the conduct of subalterns at a distance or infrastructurally, to
maximise results. They employ all the indirect means available and turn
97
98
99
For its employment within advanced liberal societies, see Rose, Powers of Freedom. Loughlin
integrates governmentality into his account of public law in The Idea of Public Law, and Anghie,
in Imperialism, traces the historical connection of governmentality, international law and the
civilising project. For an overview of research in colonial and imperial history on these techniques
of colonial governmentality, see Peter Pels, The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History and
the Emergence of Western Governmentality, Annual Review of Anthropology 26, 1997: 16383.
The classic sketch of this way of thinking about law and government is Foucault, The Subject and
Power. The section on writing back in Edward Saids Culture and Imperialism, pp. 191281, is quite
similar. See Volume I, Chapter 3.
See Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation; Sara Mills, Discourse (London: Routledge, 2004), ch. 5.
161
to military means only if all else fails. Hegemons and subalterns are thus
mutually constituted to a considerable degree by their strategic and tactical
interaction over time.100
Accordingly, any imperial relationship of knowledge, power, rules
and modes of subjectification is not a commandobedience imperative, as
in Kant, but a complex site or field of contestation over it and over the
instruments and institutions that hold it in place. These sites can be as
various as a contest over the language or literature of the imperial countries,
a meeting of the World Bank, the UN forum, the norm of democratic
inclusion in international law, rights in a sweat shop, brand marketing, local
struggles over dispossession and so on. The aim is not to engage in these
contests for their own sake, as critics often allege. It is to criticise and expose
the dominant discourses and practices in such a way as to effect not only a
modification but also a possible transformation of them from the inside.101
The masters house and tools are not something that one stands back
from and tries to overthrow from the outside, as in Audra Lourdes classic
metaphor of the decolonisation and nation-building era. Rather, the masters house and tools are the on-going indeterminate construction of the
strategic and tactical interactions of the hegemons and subalterns within. It
is not only that the shape of the imperial houses change over time as a result
of the contests, but that the relationships that constitute them are always in
principle open to a possible transformation.
For all its considerable virtues, the problem with this response to contemporary imperialism is that it is not so much an alternative to contemporary imperialism but a move within the strategic and tactical logic of
informal imperialism. It exploits the play or indeterminacy of relations of
meaning and power in order to extend and modify them as they proceed. It
appears as an alternative to imperialism because it is standardly presented in
contrast to the boundaries and binary logic of the colonial and decolonisation periods. It is certainly an alternative to both. But, if the tactical forms
of resistance recommended by post-colonial writers are viewed alongside
the corresponding transformation in the way imperial power is exercised
informally as now governing former colonials through their constrained
freedom of self-determination and low-intensity representation then these
100
101
In Power: Critical Concepts (Oxford: Polity Press, 2001), John Scott has developed a complex theory
of types of power on this basic model that covers power relations in informal imperialism. The idea
of strategic and tactical interplay in everyday practices has also been developed by post-colonial
writers from the work of Michel de Certeau (Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, p. 53).
Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, pp. 4556.
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On imperialism
forms of resistance appear to be the very ways that subalterns are already
conscripted to conduct themselves in post-colonial imperial relationships.
In so doing, they unwillingly play a role in developing these imperial
relationships.102
If, for example, post-colonial actors try to modify and transform the
international law norm of democracy beyond low-intensity democracy,
they find that there are international forums in which they can enter into
contestation. They find that an international norm is often open to democratic deliberation and modification, as the liberal-democratic theory of
the equiprimordiality of the rule of law and democracy requires. However,
the deformalised international law norm does not become the subject of the
exchange of public reasons among free and equal actors, but, rather, the
exchange of strategic and tactical acts among hegemonic and subaltern
actors positioned in a vastly unequal field of institutions of informal
imperialism. In these circumstances, it is the hegemon who is usually able
to prevail and reconfigure hegemony in the course of modifying the
deformalised norm, as we have seen in the section on the evolution of this
democratic norm. The reason for this is not only the enormous substantive
inequalities of the partners in these types of contest over the somewhat
flexible norms of informal imperial rule, but the underlying, inflexible,
relations of dependency laid down over the last five hundred years that
structure the field itself.103
In summary, post-colonial and legal-constructivist critics of imperialism,
like the earlier theorists of informal and interactive imperialism, have transformed the way we think about imperial relationships in the manner I have
summarised. They have also gone on to suggest how it is possible for
individuals and groups to act within and against the relationships that
constitute the imperial field of law and politics today. This is an important
advance on the other critics. However, they (including myself) have not yet
been able to distinguish between a form of contestation that modifies an
imperial relationship, which leaves the underlying imperial features in place
and to which the powers that be can respond and co-opt, and a form of
contestation that transforms an imperial relationship, whereby it comes
102
103
Hardt and Negri make a somewhat similar point in Empire from a different perspective.
This is, of course, Koskenniemis worry as well at the end of The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (pp. 494
509). I have discussed this dilemma of inclusion and subordination in more detail with respect to the
law in Chapters 4 and 6 of this volume. Post-colonial writings occasionally overlook Foucaults
influential formulation of the role of structures of domination in setting the stage of unequal
contests over flexible norms of action-coordination. See Foucaults The Subject and Power.
163
under the shared, continuing democratic authority of those subject to it

(and thus is de-imperialised). The traditional struggle of liberation and selfdetermination against colonisation was the classic model for transformation
throughout the twentieth century, but we now know, as Fanon first pointed
out above, that even this form of contestation did not overcome imperialism
but only led to its modification into informal imperialism. So, we do not
know if post-colonial forms of individual and collective anti-imperial contestation will lead to modifications that only reproduce the hegemony of the
informal imperial features I have enumerated, or if they might lead to their
transformation. This is not so much a criticism as a question for future
research.104
conclusion
I want to suggest that we can gain a clearer understanding of the imperial
features of the present field of public law and political theory by means of
the kind of historical and critical approach I have employed above. The
result is that a number of discursive and non-discursive features of public
law and political practices that critics have assumed to be alternatives to
imperialism turn out to be implicated in a very complex imperial ensemble.
The old and new features I summarised at the end of each section play
whether we like it or not imperial roles in what Martin Loughlin calls
the governance of contemporary legal and political associations. We are
not entrapped in these fields of imperial relationships, but, to use
Wittgensteins alternative phrase, we are entangled in them, and not so
sure of our way out as the critics of imperialism lead us to believe.105
104
105
See Christodoulidis, Constitutional Irresolution and Against Substitution: The Constitutional

Thinking of Dissensus, in The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional
Form, eds. Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), for the most
sustained critical reflection on this central dilemma. I do not mean to suggest that modifications are
not important (quite the opposite). But I do mean to suggest that research needs to be done on the
types of modifications that are possible in this complex field of post-colonial imperialism to find out
if there are ways to make minor modifications add up to something more transfiguring and lasting.
See, for example, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The World Social Forum: A Users Manual (December
2004), available at: www.ces.uc.pt/bss/documentos/fsm eng.pdf [Accessed 27 October 2006]. I
address this question directly in Chapters 8 and 9, this volume.
For a survey of the themes of entrapment, emancipation and immanent critique that run through the
theories I have discussed, see Eyal Chowers, The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the
Entrapment Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). For Wittgenstein on
entanglement, see Philosophical Investigations, 125.
164
On imperialism
I would like to end on a slightly less gloomy note. The critics I have
examined overlook not only many imperial features of the present, but also,
as strange as this sounds, many non-imperial features as well. That is, their
criticisms tend to be made within the broad horizons of the hegemonic
languages of Western imperialism and their many modifications over the
last two hundred years, from Kant and Marx, through to the critics and
defenders of imperialism today. These languages of historical development,
the global spread of Western legal and political institutions, self-determination
and democratisation, and post colonial contestation from within make it
appear that the world is actually made over accordingly by imperial expansion
and subaltern resistance.
As a result, the critics tend not to see the alterity beyond their horizon:
the legal, political and economic pluralism that has not been reconstituted
by Western imperialism but continues to exist in the day-to-day lives of
millions of people, even when they are constrained to work within the fields
of imperial relationships. These old and new alternative ways of living in the
present survive and continue to develop in their own complex and creative
ways, in relation to their own traditions, because imperialism has always
depended for its very existence on indirect and informal rule, leaving local
alternative worlds in operation to some constrained extent, and building its
relationships of control and exploitation parasitically on them. These continuing non-imperial forms of life are the living basis underlying Western
imperialism. Without these networks of local economic self-reliance, gift
relationships, mutual aid, fair trade, and legal and political pluralism,
imperialism would not survive.106 Imperialism has not made the world
over to the extent the promoters and critics presuppose.107 The world of
lived experience is actually different from the world portrayed in the texts
we have considered. For the most part, this strange multiplicity is overlooked because it is recognised and categorised within inherited imperial
languages as being less developed, pre-modern or particular. We in the
106
107
See, for examples, Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400
1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 131, 25366; and Seabrook, The NoNonsense Guide to World Poverty, pp. 11725.
My point is somewhat similar to the alternative modernities movement associated with Dipesh
Chakrabarty and Charles Taylor and the living democracy movement of Vandana Shiva. The
classic example is the Indigenous peoples of the world, who have been colonised and post-colonised
more than any other peoples of the world, yet they have been able to preserve, live and develop their
forms of life in the face of genocide, dispossession and assimilation. But non-imperial ways of life are
also elsewhere: Notes from Nowhere, ed., We are Everywhere (London: Verso, 2003); John Cavanagh
and Jerry Mander, eds., Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible (San
Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2002).
165
West have yet to enter into the difficult kind of dialogue with the others of
the world that brings this horizon of persisting languages and practices into
the space of questions and opens the interlocutors to a non-imperial
relationship of dialogue and mutual understanding.108 This would be the
beginning of an alternative to imperialism.109
108
109
For this non-imperial type of dialogue, see Tully, Strange Multiplicity, pp. 99139. Boaventura de
Sousa Santos suggests, somewhat optimistically, that the World Social Forum could act as a forum
for this kind of dialogue, in The World Social Forum: Toward a Counter-Hegemonic
Globalization: Parts I and II, in The World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, eds. Jai Sen, Anita
Anand, Arturo Escobar and Peter Waterman (New Delhi: Viveka Foundation, 2004), available at:
www.choike.org/nuevo eng/informes/1557.html [Accessed 27 October 2006].
See Chapters 8 and 9, this volume, for this argument.
chapter 6
preamble: pierre trudeaus ethos of civic

participation
The question I address in this chapter is the following: Is it possible to
establish communicative networks of reciprocal elucidation between public
philosophy and civic freedom in our present age that not only are imperial
but also have undergone a recent communications revolution? I open with a
form of civic ethics that was articulated prior to the communications
revolution.
At the heart of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeaus ethics
is the activity of paddling against the current. As early as 1944, in The
Ascetic in a Canoe, he said the ideal of paddling against the current is the
resolve to reach the saturation point. Ideally, the trip should end only when
the paddlers are making no further progress within themselves. What does
this ethic mean in practice today?
In the 1980s Trudeau campaigned for nuclear disarmament, downsizing
militaryindustrial complexes, resisting the medias glorification of violence as the means to resolve disputes, and for the turn to peaceful and
dialogical means of coping with disagreement. He saw this campaign for
human security through peace and dialogue as a part of the civic ethics
he had always practised. He said that he opposed big concentrations of
power: superpowers, militaryindustrial complexes, media conglomerates, big corporations and the enormous global inequalities these power
This article was originally written as a background paper for the First Annual Public Policy Conference
of the Pierre Trudeau Foundation held in Montreal, Canada, 1416 October 2004. I would like to thank
the many participants who commented on the original paper, especially the Trudeau Scholars, Jocelyn
Maclure, David Ley, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Stephen Toope, Jeremy Webber and Antje Wiener.
I would also like to thank Marilouise and Arthur Kroker for their helpful comments. I am greatly
indebted to Mike Simpson for his editing and helpful suggestions throughout. This article expresses my
own opinions, not those of the Trudeau Foundation.
166
167
networks enforce. His means of opposing big concentrations of power

was to empower all citizens to participate in the democratic struggles for
freedom and equality.
Trudeau argued that Canadas Charter of Rights and Freedoms should
not be seen so much as a set of guaranteed rights and freedoms handed
down from on high that Canadians could take for granted, but more as a
toolbox that citizens should use to engage in practices of civic freedom
against the unequal distribution of power in Canada and the world.1 One
does not develop the skills of a proficient canoeist by being handed a paddle
and canoe, but by engaging in the practice of canoeing to the saturation
point. It is the same with acquiring the skills of a proficient citizen. Only by
exercising their Charter rights in practices of civic freedom will future generations of Canadians develop the civic ethics of peace, dialogue and equality
of power-sharing that Trudeau saw as both the democratic means of struggle
and the aim of these struggles. Without this identity-transforming civic
experience of progress within themselves, Canadians would be shaped,
formed and swept along in the dominant current promulgated by the big
concentrations of power, becoming passive subjects rather than active democratic citizens.2
Our question today and every day is how can we adapt and apply
Trudeaus civic ethics of critical freedom against the currents of the vast
concentrations of power that shape, form and carry us along today? Before
addressing this question, we need to ascertain the character of the big
concentrations of power today.
The State of the Union Address of 31 January 2006 by US President George
W. Bush gave a clear picture of their general configuration. Although he did
not use the language of empire, he explained that the United States is the
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section B of the Constitution Act 1982, is an
amendment to the Constitution of Canada that was initiated by Pierre Trudeau while Prime
Minister. His rationale for the rights and freedoms enumerated in the Charter was that they would
empower individuals and groups in Canada to participate directly and more fully in the civic and
political life of Canada; that is, they would enable citizens to exercise their popular sovereignty. This
civic freedom aspect of the Charter was overshadowed by the debate over whether it gives proper
recognition to Quebec. My aim in this article is to recover and adapt this civic dimension of Trudeaus
legacy for our times. See Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, available at: http://laws.justice.gc.
ca/en/charter/index.html [Accessed 29 October 2006].
This description of Pierre Trudeaus civic ethics is based on his lecture to an introductory class in
political theory at McGill University in the late 1980s when he was campaigning for nuclear disarmament. The quotation from The Ascetic in a Canoe is taken from the Pierre Trudeau Foundations
website: www.trudeaufoundation.ca/trudeau e.asp [Accessed 5 May 2005]. I would like to thank
Alexandre Trudeau for discussions of this ethics today.
168
On imperialism
leader among the great powers whose role it is to govern the global empire
handed down to them by a half-millennium of Western imperialism. They
must complete the task of bringing the remaining recalcitrant states and
non-state actors in line by military means and opening their resources,
labour and markets to the global economy dominated by the corporations
of the great powers, and to perform these imperial duties in the name of
bringing (neo-liberal) freedom. If the first theme was thus to equate freedom with opening other societies to informal imperial control and structural adjustment, as the imperial powers have done for centuries, the second
theme was an equally classic imperial argument. These imperial responsibilities are not some arcane aspect of foreign policy, but, rather, directly
related to the national interest, security and economic wellbeing of the
United States and the other great powers. The indispensable and seemingly
sovereign superpower is thus, paradoxically, dependent on the efficient
operation of the global empire of exploitation and inequality, and US
citizens and their Canadian and European allies must shoulder the
demands this dependency places on them. They must stay the course
and paddle with the dominant current if they are to continue to enjoy
their privileged lifestyle, and they must explain this to themselves not only
in terms of their self-interest, but also in terms of bringing freedom to the
non-West.
This address thus implies that the big concentrations of power can be
characterised as an informal imperial system, with the United States as the
leading power, and this characterisation is substantiated by a large body
of academic literature, as we saw in Chapter 5. However, before we can
examine the possibilities of public philosophy and civic freedom in this
context, we need to examine the relations of communication available to us.
introduction: the turn to communicative
action
One of the necessary features of any form of imperialism and any form of
organised critical freedom in relation to it is communication. I want to try
to give a partial and specific answer to our question by focusing on the form
of communicative relationships in which we find ourselves, whether we
paddle with or against the prevailing current.
The transformation of communication in the past century has left us
with two well-known and seemingly paradoxical currents. The first is a
defining trend of the present when it is described as the information age or
network society: the vast proliferation of networks of communication in
169
which people share and create information and knowledge.3 Communication

networks are the media through which ideas move. This trend is associated with and legitimated by a broad and contested concept of openness.
The second current is also a defining trend of the present when it is
described as the age of insecurity or the risk society: the equally vast
proliferation of exclusions, restrictions, inducements, barriers and boundaries placed on communication, as well as on actual physical movement
and ultimately on the sharing of knowledge.4 Moreover, many of the risks
and insecurities are said to come from within communication networks,
especially since 9/11. These constraints govern the movement of ideas in
communication networks. This trend is associated with and legitimated
by a broad and contested concept of security of persons, cultures,
religions, states, networks, civilisation and freedom.
Accordingly, section 1 is an analysis of the rise of networks as the defining
form of communicative organisation in the present. Section 2 is an analysis
of the forms of control, exclusion, assimilation, hierarchy and concentration
of power that have developed along with communication networks and
govern the transmission of knowledge and information. Section 3 is an
analysis of the possibility of critical and effective forms of democratising
action within the array of networks and controls in which we are both
enabled and constrained to communicate and interact in the imperial
present.
These critical and effective forms of action are examples of the emerging
form of civic communicative freedom of we the governed that I call
democratic communicative action. It is a new form of civic freedom
appropriate to being governed through the types of imperial networks and
controls discussed in sections 1 and 2. The enactment of civic communicative freedom in and against concentrations of network power and their
communicative barriers, I will argue, is one way of adapting and applying
Trudeaus civic ethics to the present.
1 networks of communication and social
ordering
It is often remarked of the present age that, due to the astonishing growth of
formal and informal networks of knowledge, production and transfer, great
3
4
Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. I, The Rise of Network Society
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).
170
On imperialism
new possibilities exist for creation and exchange of shared knowledge across
physical and cultural boundaries. This proliferation of networks of communication is in turn the communicative dimension of a larger and epochal
trend the emergence of networks as a key means of social ordering. As
Manuel Castells states:
Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion
of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes
of production, experience, power and culture.5
Lets examine what it means to say that networks are the means not only
of producing and communicating knowledge, but also of social ordering.
The idea that the network is the defining form of social organisation
today developed out of the rapid spread of the Internet as the prototype and
basis of a network social order. The Internet originated in the United States
Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It
was designed to avoid the destruction of US communications by a Soviet
invasion. The US military figured that the Internet could not be controlled
by a vulnerable (or hostile) centre, and it would be made up of thousands of
autonomous computer networks that would have innumerable ways to
connect and overcome electronic barriers. ARPANET, the network set up
by the Defense Department, thus became the foundation of a global
communication internet network, a World Wide Web, by the mid-1990s.
In ironic confirmation of the Defense Departments thinking, the Internet
rapidly escaped the direct control of the US military and is now routinely
used by all sorts of networkers, including those whom the Department calls
its enemies, such as terrorist networks.
Although the spread of the Internet and other information highways
solidified the image of the network as the dominant form of organisation in
the popular and academic imaginary, the Internet is built on, and still
dependent upon, the earlier spread of electric light and heat, telephone,
radio, television, radar, multimedia and other electronic networks, and this
wider, pre-existing field of networks provides the background of the claim
that we live in a network age. Moreover, the image of communication
networks is ultimately grounded in the background understanding of
human communication in face-to-face networks since time immemorial.
Hence, in the primary instance, Castells claim that the network is the
reigning form of organisation today6 refers to a communication network: a
network that produces and communicates information or knowledge
5
Castells, The Rise of Network Society, p. 469.
Ibid.
171
among interconnected nodes by means of new information technology,

especially the computer. For our purposes, we can pick out four main
features of a communication network.
(1) The modes of communication range from the more or less unilateral
informing of a passive, interacted recipient at one end (information processing, surfing the web, watching a movie) to the ideal of interactive communicative exchanges among free and equal networkers continuously creating
new knowledge at the other.
(2) A node refers to any unit connected in any network: such as individual
users of communicative technology, corporations, organisations of various
and conflicting kinds, stock exchange markets, ministries, governments,
cities, states and other networks or sub-networks.7
(3) These high-tech communicative networks are not only net-like but
also exceptionally flexible and open-ended. Diverse and dissimilar nodes
can be connected and coordinated, nodes can be easily added or subtracted,
the organisation of the network can be modified, reorganised and retooled,
the information transmitted and the technologies of transmission can be
created, destroyed, programmed and reprogrammed as needed, and the
interoperating codes and switches among networks enable indeterminate
coupling and decoupling of multiple networks. According to Kevin Kelly,
the network is the least structured organisation that can be said to have any
structure at all. No other arrangement chain, pyramid, tree, circle, hub
can contain true diversity working as a whole.8
(4) Because the new information technology transmits information and
knowledge instantaneously, it compresses space and time. This is not to say
that it abolishes the here and now, the time and place of the lived practices
of particular nodes. Rather, it takes hold of and hyperextends or glocalises
(globalises and localises) spatially and temporally the experiential field of
social relations and interactions of participants in nodal practices in complex
and massively unequal ways. Instantaneous network decision-taking outruns the time frame of traditional democratic decision procedures, and the
consequences of these decisions extend across the jurisdictional boundaries
of traditional nation-states. Communication networks based on the new
technology are thus the basis of globalisation.9
7
8
9
Ibid., p. 470.
Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-biological Civilization (Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley,
1995), pp. 257; quoted in Castells, The Rise of Network Society, pp. 612.
The compression of space and time is the central nexus of globalisation according to Castells, David
Held and Anthony Giddens. For example, see Castells, The Rise of Network Society, pp. 376468; Held
et al., Global Transformations.
172
On imperialism
Accordingly, communication networks have transformed the way

humans communicate. But this is only the first dimension that has been
observed of the communication transformation. Because communication is
intrinsic to all organised forms of human activity, the rise of communication
networks and the corresponding revolution in information technology have
helped to bring about a transformation not just in the way humans
communicate, but also in the way they carry out their communicatively
mediated activities: production, distribution, finance, consumption, governance, war, resistance, culture, intimacy and much else. As Castells puts it
above, communication networks and their logic substantially modify or
colonise the communicatively mediated practices (activities and institutions) in which they are embedded. They tend to modify the practices so
that they too are organised along the lines of a network.
So, the network becomes the morphology not only of communication,
but also of the operation and outcomes in the processes of production,
experience, power and culture. It becomes the dominant form of social
ordering, transforming or displacing older forms of social, political, cultural, military and economic organisation. This deeper, colonising effect of
communication networks is referred to as the network society and the
informational transformation of society. Lets look briefly at three constitutive features of this revolution.
(1) The production and communication of information and the production of the corresponding technology have become the leading sector of
capitalist production. Following Castells, the information/communication
technology revolution coincided with the global restructuring of capitalism
and became its essential tool, thereby transforming the dominant mode of
production. This marks the transition from the industrial age and industrial
mode of production, oriented towards economic growth, to the informational age and the informational mode of production, oriented towards
information technology development (the accumulation of knowledge and
higher levels of complexity in information processing):
In the new, informational mode of development the source of productivity lies in the
technology of knowledge generation, information processing, and symbol communi
cation [W]hat is specific to the informational mode of development is the action of
knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity. Information process
ing is focused on improving the technology of information processing as a source of
productivity, in a virtuous circle of interaction between the knowledge sources of
technology and the application of technology to improve knowledge generation and
information processing Whereas industrialism is oriented to economic growth,
informationalization is oriented towards technological development, that is, toward
173
the accumulation of knowledge and higher levels of complexity in information

processing.10
(2) The informational mode of production transforms the nature of the

dominant labouring activities, from the material labour of the industrial
age (producing material objects) to the immaterial labour of the information or communication age (producing immaterial objects). According to
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, immaterial (or communicative) labour
refers to the three following changes, called the informatization of production.11 The predominant form of labour under informational capitalism is
the production of immaterial goods such as knowledge, communication, a
service, a cultural product, and the patenting and modifying of life processes
and the productive activities all involve a similar range of information
processing, communicative, problem-solving and symbolic-analytical skills.
All labouring practices tend towards the prototype of information processing and communication networks. Next, while the material labouring
activities of industrial production remain to a large extent, they are transformed by the information technology into predominantly immaterial
labour. Producing and servicing automobiles, for example, is mediated
through computer technology and communication networks.
Moreover, immaterial labour also involves the production and manipulation of affects. This refers to social services that primarily affect the
emotional wellbeing of those served. But, even more importantly, it refers
to the multimedia communication networks that affect directly the emotions, desires and especially the imagination of the audiences to whom they
communicate, without passing through self-conscious reflection. Movies,
the news, election campaigns, political events, advertising, branding, internet spam and pornography, and so on all act directly on the senses of their
connected audiences, in the Hollywoodisation of global communication.
Behaviour is now said to be governed to a considerable extent by what Guy
Debord calls the spectacle of affects,12 unmediated by conscious reflection,
whether the spectacle is Princess Dianas death, branding, election campaigns, 9/11 or the scenes of high-tech war. Far from rendering the network
revolution anachronistic, as some have suggested, the al-Qaeda networks
that orchestrated 9/11, the media that turned it into a spectacle and the
heightened securitisation, wars against terror and resistances to them that
followed all depended upon and immensely expanded processes of
networkisation.
10
11

Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 29, 280302.
12
Debord, Society of the Spectacle.
174
On imperialism
Following in the footsteps of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan,

cultural theorists suggest that what is always given directly to the recipients
in the endless programmes and messages of communication networks as
their unnoticed affects, no matter how culturally diversified the messages
may be, tends to be a fourfold background global imaginary. This imaginary
consists of production and consumption, of risks and insecurities, of the
endless programmability of cultural and natural relationships, and of us
(who are open to this imperial openness) versus them (who are backward
and closed to this brave new world) and of the cool ordering of ones
desires and emotions within it. What moves along the information highways is not so much ideas as images that structure the form of consciousness
of the recipient (paradoxically, images of the infinite programmability of
consciousness).
(3) The spread of communication networks restructures not only the
activities and subjectivities, but also the form of organisation the morphology of the practices they colonise. Castells illustrates this with the
restructuring of economic organisations in the 1990s. The industrial firm
has become the network enterprise13 with its flexible production and
flextime workers, interfirm networking, corporate strategic alliances, horizontal global business networks, its ability to make decisions, add and drop
nodes instantaneously, and constantly reinvent the network infrastructure
in whole or part:
For the first time in history, the basic unit of economic organization is not a subject,
be it individual (such as the entrepreneur or the entrepreneurial family) or collec
tive (such as the capitalist class, the corporation, the state). As I have tried to show,
the unit is the network, made up of a variety of subjects and organizations, relent
lessly modified as networks adapt to supportive environments and market
structures.14
The restructuring of economic organisation along the lines and logic of

communication networks is just the leading edge of the restructuring of
forms of human activity that undergo the informational technology revolution. The militaryindustrial sector has undergone a similar reorganisation
into militaryinformational networks. Wars are prepared for and fought on
the basis of the most advanced communicative technologies. The United
States military could not exercise the full spectrum dominance of the planet
that the Pentagon claims to exercise without the network revolution.15 Higher
education, terrorism, religious and cultural organisations, dating and so on
13
14
Castells, The Rise of Network Society, pp. 151200.

Ibid., p. 198. 15 Johnson, Sorrows of Empire.
175
have been similarly networked. As new human practices become possible as

the result of the information technologies, their forms and activities follow the
communication network model, from gene splicing and biotechnology to the
weaponisation of space.16
In addition to these three constitutive features of social ordering by
communicative networks, every form of social ordering also has distinctive
relations of power by which the conduct (roles) of those subject to it is
ordered (governed). Furthermore, being subject to these relations of governance (as I will call them) and acting in accordance with them over time
gradually brings about and instils a corresponding form of subjectivity or
subjectification. For example, being subject to and so acting in accord with
the exercise of power through the rule of law gradually brings about a form
of self-consciousness of being a law-abiding subject with rights and duties
and of comporting oneself accordingly. Social ordering by means of communication networks is no exception to this rule of subjectification. It too
has distinctive relations of network governance, and networkers tend to
acquire a corresponding network form of subjectivity through submission
to their forms of organisation, types of communicative activities and routines. These two further features of the network age are ways of governing
and controlling communication and communicators.
2 controlling communication
This leads us to an important question that is explored in this section: how
and by whom is the communication of information and knowledge controlled in the network age? No doubt there are innumerable ways in which
network communicators and their communicative actions are governed.
I would like to provide a background to this issue by highlighting four
generic types of control of communication that operate in countless instances in various networks.
(1) Exclusion. The first and most obvious way in which communication is
controlled is by the exclusion of people from communication networks.
Networks are scarcely a global phenomenon. Over one-third of the worlds
population does not have access to a power grid and so is excluded. The next
third, while in societies where power is available, does not have the money,
infrastructure or time to network. The remaining third is concentrated in the
advanced capitalist nations, predominantly in the North, and in the middle
and upper-income classes.
16
Havercroft and Duvall, Taking Sovereignty out of this World.
176
On imperialism
That is, rather than a democratic and horizontal net of equal nodes
unfolding around the globe, communication networks have developed on
the foundations of and reproduce the unequal nodes and routes of communication, commerce and military rule laid down over five hundred years of
EuropeanAmerican imperialism, as many scholars, including Castells, have
noted.17 This imperial distribution of nodes and communication routes in
which 30,000 children die every day of malnutrition in the non-connected
areas and the wealth of the two hundred richest families in the North is eight
times the wealth of 582 million non-connected people in the least developed
countries18 is the underlying constitution of the network age, just as it was of
the industrial age on which the network society is constructed. As a result, the
very people whose lives are most adversely affected by the rise of network
social ordering and who have the most pressing need and right to communicate are excluded from the outset. The network age is thus an imperial age
built upon the historical legacy of exclusions, subordinations and massive
inequalities of earlier phases of Western imperialism.
(2) Inclusion and assimilation. Communicators are also governed in networks by inclusion in and assimilation to a network form of subjectivity.
This is the central form of network governance to which every networker is
subject. Castells argues that there are two main classes: those who interact
and those who are interacted upon; and who fits in which class is determined by class, race, gender and country. Notwithstanding, there is a more
general form of self consciousness and consciousness of others that comes
along with engaging in communicative and communicatively mediated
activities in network regimes that he calls the spirit of informationalism.19
This is the habitus, the habitual form of subjectivity and corresponding set
of cognitive and behavioural competences and modes of relating to others
(intersubjectivity or interconnectivity) that agents acquire and internalise in
the course of using network technology in whatever communicative roles
they perform. It is a mode of being in the world with others that they come
to acquire through immersion in immaterial labour, of knowledge acting
on knowledge, with its creativity, flexibility and openness, its compressed
sense of time and space; its particular communicative and interactive skills
of information processing, analysis of symbols, reduction of complex
17
18
19
Castells, End of Millennium, pp. 70165.

Martti Koskenniemi, The Lady Doth Protest too Much: Kosovo, and the Turn to Ethics in
International Law, Modern Law Review 65(2), 2002: 15975, 171; UN Development Programme,
Human Development Report 2000: Human Development and Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford
Castells, The Rise of Network Society, pp. 195200.
177
phenomena to an underlying and manipulable code, and problem-solving;

its experience of being able to belong to contingent virtual communities and
cultures and to modify or disconnect from them as one pleases; and its
overriding sense of creative destructiveness that everything can be programmed and commodified. It seems to disclose the world as a set of
contingent relationships that can be created and destroyed, programmed
and reprogrammed, by the appropriate problem-solving techniques. At the
same time, networkers are always vaguely aware that they too are subject to
the communication of affects, surveillance, monitoring and manipulation
at a distance. It is a culture of the ephemeral, Castells concludes, a culture
of each strategic decision, a patchwork of experiences and interests, rather
than a charter of rights and obligations.20
Arthur Kroker suggests that the genetic engineering of the codes of life
in humans and other organic resources, at one end, and the monitoring,
surveillance and precision targeting of the global population in space-based
network warfare through full spectrum global dominance at the other
represent the two extremes of this way of being in the world (legitimated
in terms of openness of scientific inquiry and security of individuals and
the species). Here life itself is pictured as both a network and an object of
manipulation and control by informational technologies. Human nature
and the environment are absorbed into culture, and so culture/nature is
pictured as a kind of standing reserve of manipulable networks.21
This is not a form of subjectivity and intersubjectivity that a person bears
in one particular role among many. It is a communicative habitus that
communicators tend to operate within at work and leisure, on the home
computer, the cell phone, the wireless laptop and the BlackBerry. When
networkers put these more interactive modes of communication down, they
tend to turn to the technology of the communication of affects: radio,
television, movies and videos. As a result, this world-view and skill set is
carried into other areas of life, either colonising them or discarding them as
uncool if they are inaccessible through the network technology.
The form of subjectivity and intersubjectivity of network communicators
is not an ideology or a world-view in the traditional sense. It is rather the
opposite: a mode of being that is skilled in and accustomed to worldviewing surfing through, interacting with and negotiating a kaleidoscope
20
21
Ibid., p. 199.
Arthur Kroker, The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Nietzsche and Marx
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Castells, The Rise of Network Society, p. 477. If human
consciousness and embodiment are as deeply wired into communication technology as Kroker claims,
then the tempered democratic communicative action I recommend in section 3 is too little too late.
178
On imperialism
of shifting ideologies and world-views. Secular modernists, Western scientists, Indigenous peoples, neo-liberals, NGOs, anti-globalisation activists,
hyper-globalisers, deep ecologists, apocalyptic religious fundamentalists in
the Bush administration and Bin Laden terrorist networks are all at home in
this habitat. Yet, it is not a neutral, all-inclusive medium of communication.
It substantially modifies the pre-network forms of subjectivity it includes,
transforming them into contingent and malleable world-views, civilisations,
codes, programs, and scapes, yet, paradoxically, placing beyond question
its own background horizon of disclosure of the world as a complex system
of contingent and programmable networks. This taken-for-granted form
of subjectification tends to come with the network and goes without saying.
It is the characteristic form of subjectivity of network imperialism.
We are just beginning to study and make explicit the tacit ways communication networks are reorganising human subjectivity. Boaventura de Sousa
Santos and other critical sociologists of network communication and control
argue that the net brings with it, in tandem with programmability, other
taken-for-granted ways of organising and imagining experience, privileging
certain forms of communication, communicative rationality, knowledge,
problem-solving, cooperation and competition, production and consumption, and discounting or excluding others.22 Finally, although this is a powerful and insidious new form of subjectivity and social ordering, it is still one
(non-omnipotent) form among many that we bear as subjects, and we are not
passive recipients of it (as we will see in section 3).
(3) Hegemonic nodes. The third way the flow of knowledge is controlled is
through the action of the more powerful nodes in any network. The popular
image of networks as flexible, open and democratic governance communities or partnerships tends to hide this feature. Although all the various
actors (nodes) in a network (or network of networks) participate and have a
degree of active agency (the condition of it being interactive) within the
relationships of network governance, the actors are differentially situated in
these asymmetrical relationships. As a result, the more powerful or hegemonic actors within a network are able to govern and control the less powerful
or subaltern actors, not by directly commanding them to act in a certain
way, as in pre-network forms of rule, but indirectly or infrastructurally: by
structuring the field of possible actions of the subaltern actors in the
22
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization and Emancipation,
2nd edition (London: Butterworths, 2002); and Santos, The World Social Forum: Toward a CounterHegemonic Globalization, section entitled The WSF and the Sociology of Absences.
179
network through strategically controlling the flexible and hierarchical infrastructural relations of communication, technology, research, finance, security, norm creation, and subjectification among them.
The distinctive feature of this form of network governmentality is that it
is able to govern the conduct of weaker partners through their constrained
free participation; through inducing and then indirectly channelling, by
diverse means, their communicative, creative and productive participation,
or by excluding them and connecting with others if they fail to participate in
the way the hegemonic actors require. It is precisely this dimension of
constrained free participation in a seeming democratic and flexible community of actors and norms, and where actors may be added and removed
on an ad hoc basis, that serves to legitimate and obscure the differentials in
power and influence between hegemon and subaltern participants in imperial networks. Jochen Von Bernstorff sums up the critical literature on this
hegemonic type of network rule in his major study of publicprivate
network governance systems in the EU and the international arena:
The more abstract thesis developed throughout is that, on the global level, network
like governance structures inevitably exclude certain actors and interests while
operating outside procedural and substantive legal commitments and constraints.
These flip sides of the flexible network structure tend to sustain the dominance of
the strongest actors of the network, and may turn the participatory claim into an
instrument of hegemony.23
Lets use two well-researched examples to illustrate the two general types
of hegemonic network governance of communication referred to in this
abstract quotation. These two types of hegemonic network governance can
be found in almost any network, structuring the network and bypassing or
overriding governmental institutions.
We saw in section 1 that transnational corporations were among the first
organisations to be transformed into networks by the information and
communication revolution. In this reconfiguration they do not need to
own their branch plants in the Third World and directly control the workers
in them, as was the form of social ordering in the industrial age. Rather,
branch plants in which the worlds information technology is typically
assembled are often owned locally or regionally. They are participating actors
in a global network exercising their interactive labour and management
powers in their own ways to a certain limited extent. However, as Naomi
Klein and others argue, their free participation is governed indirectly by the
23
Jochen Von Bernstorff, Democratic Global Internet Regulation? Governance Networks, International
Law and the Shadow of Hegemony, European Law Journal 9(4), 2003: 51126, 513.
180
On imperialism
control that the hegemonic transnational corporations are able to exert over
the infrastructural relations between the subaltern plant or sweat shop and its
access to resources, financing, technology, research, branding networks and
world markets.24
Von Bernstorff stresses that a key factor here is the ability of powerful
actors to set up and structure a network in the first place. Moreover, if
subaltern nodes fail to deliver the goods or adapt to the flexible work regimes,
then the hegemonic corporation can govern their participation by constraining their access to the network infrastructure; entering into a publicprivate
network partnership with the local government to support them and suppress
the workers expression of their grievances; threatening to remove them from
the network, or removing them and adding a more compliant node. If the
weaker actors in the network are able to exert a degree of collective control
over the hegemonic actors, then the latter can leave the network and establish
another. Here, as in thousands of other unequal networks, flexibility and
openness become strategic resources for the hegemonic actors, rather than
indicators of democratic transparency.25
The second type of hegemonic network governance over communicative
and communicatively mediated activities consists in bypassing or overriding
domestic and international legal and political institutions that would otherwise be able to enforce the freedom of expression and access to information
of the subalterns. This type of undemocratic control over communication is
called the delegalisation and de-democratisation of governance networks.
Von Bernstorff shows that the more powerful states and transnational
corporations in various global governance networks are able to do this in
a wide variety of ways.
Networks operate in a different communicative time and space from
traditional legal and political institutions (section 1). Owing to the compression of time, decisions are taken instantly, in contrast to the timeconsuming due deliberation, consultation and accountability of traditional
legal and democratic forms of communicative reasoning and decisionmaking. And, owing to the compression of space, network decisions (such
as financial decisions) affect the lives, environments and futures of millions
of people, regions and countries around the globe who have no say over
them; in contrast to the effects of decisions of traditional legal and democratic institutions, which are limited to a specific territory and jurisdiction,
and according to which all affected should theoretically have a say,
24
25
Klein, No Logo; Falk, Predatory Globalization.

Von Bernstorff, Democratic Global Internet Regulation?, pp. 5245.
181
representation or redress. (Of course, this ideal of representation and legal

recourse is often unrealised in practice, yet, unlike networks, it is a norm
of legitimacy intrinsic to legal-democratic institutions and their historical development.) As a result, governance networks seek to free their
secret, immensely consequential and unaccountable communicative and
decision-making procedures from the time-expensive and spatially limited,
old-fashioned legal and democratic restraints, in the name of efficiency,
flexibility and the technical imperatives of the new age. In the words of
President Clintons administrations domain-name policy coordinator, Ira
Magaziner, in 1998: We believe that the Internet as it develops needs a
different type of coordination structure than has been typical for international institutions in the industrial age. Governmental processes and
Intergovernmental processes by definition work too slowly and somewhat
too bureaucratically for the pace and flexibility of this new information
age.26 How are network governance structures able to bypass or override
traditional legal and democratic communicative procedures that have been
built up over the centuries?
In the first instance, as the quotation from Ira Magaziner implies, the
operation of powerful governance networks simply leaves the traditional
legal and political institutions in their wake, and this lag then serves to
support the claim to exemption. Next, hegemonic actors in global governance networks are able to create and control their own global constitutional and normative orders, administered by the WB, IMF and the WTO,
that override the legal and political institutions of representative democracies and international law; precisely the institutions that could open these
guarded networks to democratic communicative action.27 In other cases,
they are also able to outrun traditional legal and democratic protection
of the flow of ideas by expanding their own, tailor-made, flexible and
manipulable network of private law to govern networks, the controversial
lex mercatoria.28 Finally, even when powerful networks are constrained to
work with traditional institutions they are able to mobilise influence over
parliaments and courts, not least through the ability of the oligarchy of
media networks to create the language, images and effects of public
discussion.
26
27
28
Cited in Von Bernstorff, Democratic Global Internet Regulation?, p. 515.

Shrybman, The World Trade Organization.
A. Claire Cutler, Private Power and Global Authority: Transnational Merchant Law in the Global
Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
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On imperialism
The rapid rise of this hegemonic mode of network governance of communicative action and its capacity to manipulate or evade the fetters of legaldemocratic modes of governing communication is not as surprising as it may
seem. Recall from Castells analysis that communication networks were
developed by the four biggest pre-existing concentrations of power from
the earlier age of industrial imperialism and under the lead of the United
States: the militaryindustrial complex, private economic enterprises, the
leading states prepared to support and promote the research, development
and employment of the new technology, and the multimedia conglomerates.
The information revolution transformed these four concentrations of power
into the same network morphology and, in so doing, coordinated their
interaction through common overlapping networks and a common orientation to expansion of the network age. The result is a global politics of
structuration. The complex interactions and competition among networks
of these differentially situated and resourced actors give rise to persisting
global hegemonicsubaltern formations (or processes), and the large-scale
formations reciprocally structure the field of interactions, as in struggles over
the Kyoto Accord, sustainability and the Washington Consensus.29
In what is perhaps the dominant public language of our age, a global
pattern of hegemonicsubaltern networks, and its expansion over and
against other modes of communication and social ordering, is legitimated
in terms of freedom and security. The sense of freedom here is openness the openness of individuals, groups, cultures and civilisations to
enter and participate in the creative, expanding world of communication
networks, and to exercise their freedom to communicate, produce and
consume in the ways available to them. The complementary sense of
security is the global monitoring, protection and extension of market
freedoms and network freedoms, backed up by the full spectrum dominance of the United States global military network. This indispensable
security and freedom network is presented by its proponents as acting in
accord with the legal and democratic institutions when possible, but it is
prepared to act instantly, unilaterally and globally, in cases such as military
intervention, without and against the time-consuming, multilateral communicative review of international law, civil liberties and democratic willformation domestically or through the UN, for the transcendent goods of
freedom and security.30 Many of the traditional rights and freedoms of
29
30

This global network strategy of freedom and security is presented in two documents: The White
House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America; and United States Space Command,
183
information and communication are dispensable in this new form of social

ordering, as was demonstrated in the invasion of Iraq, the Patriot Act in the
United States and the Anti-Terrorism Act in Canada. At many levels and to
varying degrees, this cluster of hegemonic networks and legitimating languages of freedom and security structures the global field of possible
alternative communicative actions in the network age.31 And, perhaps partly
because of its pre-eminence, the two types of hegemonic rule employed to
control communicative activities are replicated in innumerable other networks (including the terrorist networks it opposes).
(4) Governance within communication relations. Finally, I would like to
examine the specific nature of relations of governance characteristic of
network governance. This will provide a fuller understanding of how
communicative activities are actually guided by this form of governance,
and constitute the basis for understanding how we can act critically in
response (section 3).
The first distinctive characteristic of relations of network governance is
that they are immanent within relations of communication, and, as we have
seen, relations of communication are immanent within relations of immaterial production. Networkers are subject to relations of governance of their
communication and communicatively mediated activities just in virtue of
participating in them. The diverse technological and multimedia infrastructure employed in all communicative activities information technologies, modes of communication, programs, codes, routines, commands,
messages, operations, learning procedures and acquired skill sets governs
the conduct of the communicators as they work, almost intangibly.
A relation of network governance is not so much a single relation of
power acting on an individual subject from outside his or her activities as
it is governmentality: a whole ensemble of governmental means operating
within and on a field of interrelated communicators to create an overall
network mentalit.32 This technological absorption of relations of power
directly into relations of communication is, according to Hardt and Negri,
the most revolutionary feature of the network age. Relations of governance
31
Vision for 2020 (February 1997), available at: www.middlepowers.org/gsi/docs/vision 2020.pdf

[Accessed 29 October 2006]. For an excellent analysis of the global security strategy of the United
States, and place of the first document in it, in relation to international law, see Brunne and Toope,
Slouching Towards New Just Wars. For the historical development of the hegemonic language of
security and freedom, see Bacevich, American Empire. For these themes, see also The White House,
State of the Union Address (31 January 2006), available at: www.whitehouse.gov/stateoftheunion/2006
[Accessed 29 October 2006].
Johnson, Sorrows of Empire. 32 Rose, Powers of Freedom.
184
On imperialism
thus become ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens:33
What the theories of power of modernity were forced to consider transcendent,
that is, external to productive and social relations, is here formed inside, immanent
to the productive and social relations. This is why communications industries have
assumed such a central position. They not only organize production on a new scale
and impose a new structure adequate to global space, but also make its justification
immanent. Power, as it produces, organizes; as it organizes, it speaks and expresses
itself as authority. Language, as it communicates, produces commodities but
moreover creates subjectivities, puts them in relation, and orders them. The
communication industries integrate the imaginary and the symbolic within the
biopolitical fabric, not merely putting them at the service of power, but actually
integrating them into its very functioning.34
From one perspective the folding of power relations into communication

relations makes this form of social ordering more decentralised, horizontal,
more indistinguishable from the communicative activities we perform, and
thus in a sense more democratic. Yet, from another perspective, it provides
for a more vertical, more oligopolistic form of control of communication
by the more powerful nodes:
[T]he computer technologies and communications technologies internal to pro
duction systems allow for more extensive monitoring of workers from a central,
remote location. Control of labouring activity can potentially be individualized and
continuous in the virtual Panopticon of network production. The centralization of
control, however, is even clearer from a global perspective. The geographical
dispersion of manufacturing has created a demand for increasingly centralized
management and planning, and also for a new centralization of specialized pro
ducer services, especially financial services.35
This vertical or oligopolistic dimension is the basis for the kind of

hegemonic governance of network communications discussed above.
Hegemonic actors do not govern the communication of subalterns directly,
but indirectly, by strategically manipulating, monitoring, planning, dispersing, appraising, contracting-out and restructuring the horizontal distribution
33
34
35
Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 23.

Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 33. By creating subjectivities, Hardt and Negri mean that relations of
immanent communicative governance give rise to the corresponding network form of subjectivity we
discussed above.
Ibid., p. 297.
185
and employment of technological infrastructure to guide immanently communicative activities to specific ends. Relations of network governance are
thus immanent to the field of communicative action and are at once
democratic and oligopolistic.
The second distinctive feature of relations of communicative governance
is that they operate through the communicative freedom of networkers;
through their communicative action. Networkers are not coerced by the
detailed drills and repetitions of the industrial age, the assembly line or
Modern Times. From the beginning, starting now in day care, networkers
are encouraged to see network communication from two perspectives.
From one side, it is absolutely necessary to submit to commands, functions
and routines as an enabling condition of becoming a networker and learning
the rules of the game. On the other hand, it is a flexible and open-ended
game in which networkers are treated as free players, as interactive and
creative communicators, modifying the rules of the game as they play. They
interact with the software and are encouraged to ask it questions, create new
and different ways through the programs, customise the software, acquire
and contribute information, solve problems and pose others, create their
own networks, and eventually reprogramme the programs through which
they are governed. This is another reason why the immanent relations of
governance and forms of subjectification in network communication are so
difficult to notice. For we tend to presume that the exercise of power must
be external (a separate structure of rulerruled) rather than immanent; that
it excludes the exercise of freedom rather than encourages it (liberalisms
negative freedom); and that it imposes itself on a passive subject rather than
playing strategic games with an interactive agent (the commandobedience
model).
The informational mode of education, research, development, production and consumption actually depends for its existence and dynamic
growth on this interplay between immanent relations of governance
and the free, creative and unpredictable communicative competences
of networkers, celebrated in the image of Silicon Valley. As a result, network
relations of power are reciprocally dependent on and responsive to the
communicative freedom of networkers. They govern communicative action
and assimilate communicators interactively, by enabling and encouraging
the free development of communicative capacities on one side and conducting their exercise to specific ends by diverse means on the other, and by
constantly readjusting in response to the unpredictable trajectory of communicative action. This realm of communicative freedom within network
power relations is the subject of the final section.
186
On imperialism
3 democratic communicative action
To summarise, I have tried to provide a background sketch of the field in

which communicative activity is controlled today. The communication of
information and knowledge in networks is the defining form of human
activity of our age and the dominant form of social ordering. Communicative
action takes place within networks (with four main features); communication networks are the leading sector of the economy; and they transform the
communicatively mediated activities and institutions they colonise (into
networks of immaterial labour). Communicative and communicatively
mediated action in networks is governed by four major means: (1) exclusion,
(2) inclusion and assimilation to an interactive network form of subjectification, (3) the strategic use of communications infrastructure and the
bypassing, overriding and influencing of legal-democratic governance, and
(4) the employment of immanent, democratic and oligopolistic power
relations to foster and channel free communicative action. This complex
field of communication networks is the specific morphology of the latest
phase of Western imperialism.
This background sketch sets the stage for a third important question:
What form of critical and effective social, political and cultural action is
possible today in relation to the control of the communication of knowledge? We could not answer this question without first laying out the specific
context in which communication occurs and the relations of governance
that enable and control it. For social action will be critical and effective only
if it is based on an understanding of, and oriented in relation to, the specific
relations of communication and governance in which it is situated. We
may dream of utopian modes of communicative action as much as we wish
free of power, technological mediation, spatial-temporal compression,
hegemonicsubaltern relations and pre-reflective subjectification. But if
we wish to confront the historical situation into which we are thrown,
then (as I have argued elsewhere) we need to situate our question in the
existing field of relationships.36
I take this sketch of the existing field of power relations that operate in
contemporary communications networks to be a more realistic approach
than the optimistic literature on network governance and policy networks.
As Jochen Von Bernstorffs study suggests, this literature has a tendency to
abstract from the unequal power relations in communication networks in
advancing the claim that global networking fosters democratic governance
36
See Volume I, Chapter 1 for this approach.
187
beyond the state.37 This is to disregard the forms of exclusion and to equate
inclusion with democracy, thereby overlooking the anti-democratic powers
of assimilation, subjectification and subalternisation that are exercised
directly or indirectly by hegemonic actors within the field of communication networks. And, it overlooks the persisting relations of inequality and
subordination handed down from earlier phases of imperialism. Even the
important work that seeks to combine bargaining with the more idealised
arguing approach in international relations and international law still
presupposes actors who are free of precisely the real-world unequal relations
of governance that I have tried to delineate in my sketch.38 As Antje Weiner
concludes in her critical review of this literature, it presupposes an egalitarian political culture that does not exist.39 What we need in order to be
both critical and effective is not an account of norm creation for some ideal
game, but an account of the possibility of democratic norm creation under
the conditions of the field in which we find ourselves here and now.40
Now, Castells writes of this field and social action:
I would argue that this networking logic induces a social determination of a higher
level than that of specific social interests expressed through the networks: the power
of flows takes precedence over the flows of power. Presence or absence in the
network and the dynamics of each network vis--vis others are critical sources of
domination and change in our society: a society, that, therefore, we may properly
call the network society, characterized by the preeminence of social morphology
over social action.41
We will see if it is as deterministic as he implies. Yet, given our background sketch, he does seem correct to infer that network social morphology is pre-eminent over social action. I take him to mean that, if critical and
effective social action is possible today, then social actors are constrained to
think and act within and against the given social morphology of communication networks.
The first answer to our question of the possibility of critical action,
therefore, is just to raise explicit awareness of the distinctive background
context in which we communicate today, by means of various background
sketches. For, as we discussed, network subjectivity tends to render its mode
of governance intangible, a matter of course, and its immanent rule goes
37
38
39
41
Von Bernstorff, Democratic Global Internet Regulation?

Harald Mller, Arguing, Bargaining and All That: Communicative Action, Rationalist Theory and
the Logic of Appropriateness in International Relations, European Journal of International Relations
10(3), 2004: 395435.
Wiener, The Dual Quality of Norms. 40 See Chapters 2 and 4, this volume.
188
On imperialism
without saying. Uncritical reflection on communication and control then

tends to overlook the implicit infrastructural relations that govern communicative action without the communicators questioning them and having a
say in and over them; that is, undemocratically.
Rendering networks and network governance explicit thus puts us in the
position of being able to call into question and have a say over the relations
of power through which our communication is governed and the norms
that are advanced to legitimate them, that is, of acting democratically. For,
the primary sense of democracy (as opposed to the low-intensity democratisation promoted by the neo-liberal institutions) is just the basic Athenian
idea that the people have a say in and over the rules by which they are
governed and over the public goods the rules are enacted to bring about. We
can thus call the diverse forms of questioning and having an effective say in
and over the global and local relations governing all communication and
communicatively mediated action democratic communicative action. This
is to apply Trudeaus civic ethics directly to everyday communication
relations. So, our question can be reformulated as follows: what are the
possibilities and examples of democratic communicative action?
Two general types of democratic communicative action are possible.42
The first is to subject communication networks to the traditional legal and
political institutions of existing nation-states, international law and the
United Nations. The flow and control of ideas would be regulated in these
legal-democratic institutions by the representatives of the people subject to
network governance, against the dominant current of hegemonic rule by
powerful network actors and their delegalisation and de-democratisation
of network communication. This might be called the traditional legaldemocratic approach locally and globally. As noted earlier, legal-democratic,
Enlightenment institutions are works in progress that require major reforms
to be effective, especially in the international realm, and their inadequacy has
led to the search for another, more effective strategy.
The second general strategy, accordingly, is to democratise communication networks directly, so networkers and those excluded yet affected can
call into question and have a say in contextually appropriate practices of
democratic discussion, negotiation and decision-making in the nodes in
which they network (or from which they are presently excluded). This runs
against the dominant current of assimilation and subjection to a form of
communicative interaction that, while creative in many dimensions, is
subtly (and not so subtly) channelled away from networkers questioning
42
See Chapter 2, this volume.
189
and transforming the dominant undemocratic relations of network governance. The creation of sites of democratic communicative action within
networks might be called a new approach, one tailored specifically to the
new form of communicative power, but also simply a new form of direct or
participatory democracy. Direct democratic communicative action is the
fitting response to the compressed time and space of network communication and decision-making, as it too can be mobilised instantaneously and
across the multi-jurisdictional global space of network effects.
These two types of democratic communicative action are counter-hegemonic
(against the dominant undemocratic control of the flow of ideas) and
complementary (working in tandem against different types of undemocratic
control). One of the most depressing features of Canada today is the
antagonism between proponents of these two strategies between those
who participate through the traditional institutions and those who wish to
participate directly through direct democratic communicative action in
networks. Yet, both strategies have the same means and end: the democratic
governance of the means of communication by the communicators.43
If these two strategies were successful, they would constitute a revolution
the legal-democratic transformation of the network age. The people and
their representatives would decide how to govern the communication of
knowledge and information and for what ends. Such a transformation
appears utopian from the perspective of the present, and it certainly is if
we imagine that the dominant actors of the network age might institute this
transformation for us. If there is to be change in this direction, we the
governed have to initiate it from the ground up by organising and participating in concrete forms of democratic communicative action that enact
initiatory and exemplary practices of these two strategies here and now.
Hence, we are in a situation analogous to Trudeaus three decades ago.
For him the question was, given the big concentrations of power in Canada
and globally, how could he help to empower citizens to participate democratically in civil society, communicate freely, democratise hegemonic concentrations of power and repatriate democratic powers and power-sharing
to the sovereign people, and so diminish the enormous inequalities?
His answer was Canadas Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the
43
These two types of democratic-communicative action have to be pursued in tandem as they are
mutually supportive. Von Bernstorff concludes that the problem of delegalisation cannot be solved
by the reference to a higher standard of accountability and transparency through a network
constitution or ombudsman structures for informal governance arrangements. Principles of good
governance cannot substitute for the loss of procedural constraints and substantive commitments
imposed by a legal order (Democratic Global Internet Regulation?, p. 526).
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On imperialism
counter-hegemonic civic ethics he hoped it would foster. The difference

today is that the concentrations of power and means of participation have
been transformed by the communications revolution, and thus the analogous answer is democratic communicative action that subjects network
communication to democratic control, and does so by democratic communicative means.
The first step is to realise that the possibilities and opportunities for
democratic communicative action exist here and now, wherever we communicate.44 Section 2 suggested that the entire network organisation of
contemporary societies rests on the free, creative communicative capacities
and activities of networkers. Network governance relations can foster
communicative action and channel it towards specific ends, but they cannot
control it in detail, for the development of the information age depends on
creative and innovative forms of communication. This is why networks are
necessarily flexible and open, encouraging and then responding to the
indeterminate and unpredictable communicative activities of networkers,
rather than fixed structures of domination. As a result, there is an element of
interactive freedom or free play a limited range of possible ways of
communicating in any network situation. There is thus always the limited
possibility of communicating differently, in discord with the commands,
routines and norms in some way or another just as in canoeing, there is
always the possibility to turn and paddle against the current in different
ways. This element of interactive human freedom and surprise is
irreducible.
Now, this creative communicative freedom is directed, with all the
powerful technological and multimedia means at the disposal of hegemonic
actors, towards its exercise in innovations and creations that serve the
prevailing imperial ordering and goals of the information age. In contrast,
the exercise of creative communicative freedom democratically on the
prevailing governance relations is discouraged, except for innovations in
forms of local or regional self-rule and self-management that increase
efficiency and can themselves be governed and monitored infrastructurally
(as in the downloading and contracting-out of regimes of self-government
and dispute resolution to subaltern nodes in local, national and global
governance networks). Nonetheless, because relations of governance are
immanent within relations of communication, the existential possibility of
exercising creative communicative freedom in its democratic form cannot
be eliminated or blocked completely by the powers that be.
44
Notes from Nowhere, ed., We are Everywhere.
191
Not only is democratic communicative action possible in some abstract

sense. It is an opportunity in any node. The popular image of the
expansion of the network age that the media communicate over and over
is of a cluster of global processes or closed systems that are technologically
driven, necessary and inescapable, too complex to be modified by those
subject to them, and, in any case beyond human control. Yet, networks are
grounded in the communicative activities of networkers at their particular
nodes, and the hyperextension of these activities and decisions throughout
the network. As heretical as this may sound to some systems theorists, these
local practices of network communication are in turn partly grounded in the
daily, non-technological, face-to-face relations of communication of the
networkers, and these alternative forms of intersubjectivity provide grounds
of resistance to networkisation. Of course, there are hegemonic structural
formations of global networks and forms of subjectivity that make these
formations appear inevitable. But both formations and subjectivities are
grounded in and reproduced by the daily practices of local networkers going
along with the prevailing routines of communication without a say. So,
despite the hegemonic image of deterministic technological processes
imposed on us from above and to which we must submit, global networkisation is actually based in and hyperextends out from the everyday communicative activities of networkers. Steven Flusty describes this more
accurate and counter-hegemonic picture:
[Network globalization] is a combination of distinct spatial and temporal practices
that, in their execution and their accretion, exercise globally formative effects.
These practices are brought about through the quotidian business of conducting
life within and across ever widening distances and by means of ever more distended
social relations. It thus entails a redefinition of globalization not as an extrinsic
quasi opaque imposition from above, an irresistible structural imperative, or a
commandment unifying capital markets. Rather, it is globalization as both imma
nent in, and increasingly intrinsic to, our everyday practices.45
Consequently, communication networks are less deterministic and provide more opportunities for democratic challenge and reform from within
than Castells suggests. I would like to illustrate the range of opportunities
available with a few examples of counter-hegemonic democratic communicative action that have helped to bring communication networks under
direct and/or legal-democratic governance. The most popular vehicle for
democratic communicative action in the network age is without doubt
NGOs. However, their role is ambivalent. Many NGO counter-networks
45
Flusty, De-Coca-Colonization, pp. 34.
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On imperialism
have been successful in organising and including many formerly excluded

peoples, challenging the assimilative features of network subjectivity, countering the hegemonic rule and aims of powerful actors in major communicative networks, and showing ordinary people that they have more freedom
to organise and act critically than they are led to believe by the dominant
discourse. Yet many other NGOs have been instrumental in reproducing
and expanding some of the undemocratic features of existing networks.
Over 70 per cent of the 50,000 INGOs (international NGOs) are registered
in Europe and North America and funded by Northern governments and
corporations to promote their agendas. When they bring excluded peoples
into the major government and corporate development networks, they
often discount their traditional forms of communication and cooperation
and assimilate them to the network form of communication and subjectivity they bring with them, rather than nurturing non-assimilative forms of
inclusion. Their relatively ineffective informal consultative role in major
networks is often used by the hegemonic actors to simulate democratic
scrutiny and to legitimate cosmetic changes. Furthermore, NGO networks
are often unaccountable to the people whose interests they claim to represent and their internal organisation tends to replicate the hegemonic
subaltern structure and undemocratic decision-making of major networks.
Many are now referred to as CONGOS (co-opted NGOS).46
Since, as Castells argues, social action has to be organised in networks to
be effective, NGO networks will continue to be used. However, if they are
to be a means for the gradual democratisation of communication in the
network age, they too will have to be subject to democratic reform from
within, so they embody the same democratic communicative action for
which they claim to be fighting.
One instructive example of combining the legal-democratic and direct
democracy types of communicative action is the use of democraticcommunicative or soft power networks to bring about an enforceable
ban on land-mines. This in turn is part of a larger, counter-hegemonic,
soft power network organised through countless nodes of communicative
action to question and fight to reform the dominant, global securityfreedom
network in the name of another kind of security and freedom. From this
counter-perspective, the causes of insecurity and unfreedom are the
46
For a relatively optimistic view of NGOs, see John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), and for a critical view, see Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 357,
31214. For a range of views based on case studies, see Sanjeev Khangram, James Riker and Kathryn
Sikkink, eds., Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
193
enormous global inequalities and the exclusion of the worse-off majority

from democratic-communicative action. The dominant global security
freedom network does not address these underlying causes but, rather,
protects and extends them, causing more wars and insecurity. The path to
security and equality is to provide the multifaceted infrastructure of network communication that developing countries demand, so they can
engage in free communicative action on a level playing field, and then the
other inequalities will soon diminish. This global counter-network is far
from successful, yet it demonstrates the power of democratic-communicative
action to challenge and offer an alternative to the networks that now govern
undemocratically the communicative action of millions.47
From the pioneering activities of Amnesty International and Doctors
Without Borders in confronting and opening closed channels of communication to the latest small-scale, alternative network globalisation from
below, such as providing e-mail for rural doctors and missionaries in
Zambia by high-frequency radio and Sailmail, there are countless other
examples from which we can learn.48 However, I would like to move on and
conclude with one final and indispensable feature of democratic communicative activities if they are to be effective in building a better future.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos observes with respect to the World Social
Forum that we need more meeting places for the multiplicity of counterhegemonic democratic networkers.49 These forums would be places like the
annual Pierre Trudeau Foundation Public Policy Conferences in Canada,
where researchers, academics, students, democratic activists from diverse
networks, representatives from the excluded majority, policy makers, filmmakers, communication experts, scientists, technicians and business people
working on soft, democratic communicative technologies and education,
representatives from the volunteer sector, politicians and a host of other
actors could come together and exchange their case-specific and specialised
knowledge of how network communications are governed and how they
can be rendered more accountable by democratic communicative action.
They would be places for anyone uncomfortable with the ways in which
communication is currently governed and hopeful that another world is
possible. If democratic communicative action is to be critical and effective,
47
48
49
Lloyd Axworthy, Navigating a New World: Canadas Global Future (Toronto: Knopf Canada,
2003).
E-mail Innovation Helps Zambia Go Global, Times Colonist, 11 July 2004: B1. For recent surveys,
see Flusty, De-Coca-Colonization; Brecher, Costello and Smith, Globalization from Below; Louise
Amoore, ed., The Global Resistance Reader (London: Routledge, 2005).
Santos, The World Social Forum: Towards a Counter-Hegemonic Globalization, pp. 6989, 121.
194
On imperialism
it needs to be based on the reciprocal communication among academic

research on how communication networks operate, policy communities
knowledge of what sorts of local, domestic and international legal and
political initiatives are possible, and the experiential knowledge of communicative activists and the excluded on the ground. Finally, these forums
could be models of democratic communicative action in which the participants learn through practice the civic ethics they hope to hyperextend in
their diverse activities. The World Social Forum is an exemplary annual
meeting place of such reciprocal networks, but the task now is to create a
multitude of similar and more specific forums.50
50
See Chapters 8 and 9, this volume.
chapter 7
The imperial roles of modern

constitutional democracy
introduction
The title of this chapter derives from an article in the Economic History
Review in 1953 by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson entitled The
Imperialism of Free Trade. The authors showed that the foreign policy of
free trade by the imperial powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
was not anti-imperial but, rather, an alternative form of imperialism to
colonial imperialism that gradually won out in the late twentieth century.
The great powers, with Great Britain in the lead, realised that they could
orchestrate the formation of legal and political regimes in non-European
countries so they would function to open their resources, labour and
markets to free trade dominated by economic competition among
European powers, without the need for the expensive and increasingly
unpopular old imperial system of formal colonies and monopoly trading
companies. In a series of publications in the following decades, Robinson,
the German imperial historians Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jrgen
Osterhammel, and their many followers went on to document the long
and complex history of free trade imperialism since the eighteenth century
and to argue that decolonisation and the Cold War comprised its triumph
over colonial imperialism. Decolonisation and the Cold War, they argued,
involved the dismantling of the remaining formal colonies, mandates and
trusteeships; the transfer of limited powers of self-rule to the westernised
elites of nominally sovereign, yet dependent Indigenous governments in
a global network of free trade imperialism. This imperial network is governed by the post-Second World War great powers (the G8 with the
United States taking the military and economic lead); their transnational
This paper was initially presented at The Conference on Constituent Power and Constitutional Form
(Department of Law, European University Institute, Florence, 2425 March 2006). I would like to
thank Jonathan Havercroft, Neil Walker and the participants at this conference for their helpful
comments. The chapter draws on and expands the analysis in Chapters 4 and 5, this volume.
195
196
On imperialism
corporations; the Bretton Woods institutions of global governance and their

successors (the WB, IMF, GATT, the WTO after 1995 and its evolving
transnational trade agreements such as the Trade-Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights agreement (TRIPs) and the General Agreement
on Trade in Services (GATS); supportive NGOs; and the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO)). They called this complex transition period
the imperialism of decolonisation and the end of empire and the continuity
of imperialism. Since the defeat of the Soviet Union and its Third World
allies at the end of the Cold War in 1989, this complex form of rule has been
extended over the planet.1
This now widely used interpretation of the modern world order is often
termed open door and free trade imperialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism without colonies, and post-colonial imperialism, but for two defining
reasons it is now usually called informal and interactive imperialism.
Firstly, it is a complex form of rule that governs imperialised peoples by
means other than formal colonies (informal and indirect means). Secondly,
the hegemonic great powers and their accompanying institutions recognise
the imperialised or subalternised peoples as self-governing constitutional
states and they interact with them on this basis, yet within the deeply
unequal hegemonsubaltern relations of economic, political, legal, educational and military power laid down over centuries of Western expansion
(interactive rule among unequal sovereigns rather than the unilateral domination of colonialism).
While Gallagher, Robinson and Mommsen stressed the importance of
the legal and political institutions in dispossessing non-European peoples of
popular sovereignty over their resources, labour and markets and opening
them to the informal paramountcy of the great powers and their trading
companies, they did not treat this aspect in detail, concentrating instead on
economic, administrative, military and educational means of informal
dependency and rule. The objective of this chapter is to describe the
imperial roles that modern constitutional forms and constituent powers
have played in this interpretation of global rule. The first section sets out
seven main aspects of the modern Western configuration of constituent
powers and constitutional forms that is commonly called constitutional
democracy and democratisation today. The second section goes on
to show the many ways in which legal and political prototypes of
1
Robinson and Gallagher, The Imperialism of Free Trade. The importance of the theory of informal
imperialism advanced by Gallagher and Robinson is discussed in Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism,
pp. 8693, who argues that it is the most important theory of imperialism in the modern period.
Imperialism and modern constitutional democracy
197
constitutional democracy have been extended around the world by formal

and informal imperial means to subalternise non-European peoples. The
third and final section examines democratic efforts to de-imperialise the
imperial dimensions of modern constitutional democracy, that is, to bring
them under the shared democratic authority of the peoples who are subject
to them. I call these de-imperialising attempts democratic constitutionalism (in contrast to constitutional democracy).2
1 western constitutional democracy: the modern
arrangement of constituent powers
and constitutional forms
In their perspicuous Introduction to The Conference on Constituent Power
and Constitutional Form, Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker describe the
central tension of the modern organisation of constituent powers and constitutional forms as follows:
The paradox [of constituent power and constitutional form] is the expression of the
fact that modern constitutionalism is underpinned by two fundamental though
antagonistic imperatives: that governmental power ultimately is generated from the
consent of the people, and that, to be sustained and effective, governmental power
must be divided, constrained and exercised through distinctive institutional forms.
Although each of the imperatives is expressed in early modern formulations of
legitimate governmental power, it is only with the emergence of the modern sense
of a constitution that this tension between constituent power (the power of the
people to make and break the constituted authority of the state) and constitu
tional form (the formal framework of rule erected as a bargain or contract, or
evolved in their absence) becomes more acute.3
I start from their description and analysis to set out seven salient aspects or
features of this paradoxical modern configuration of constituent powers
and constitutional forms. I follow common usage in calling this conjunction
of modern Western-style constitutions and representative governments
constitutional democracy (without scare quotes), yet bearing in mind
that this elegant phrase hides its historical particularity and makes it appear
universal (which is precisely its rhetorical function). I call it constitutional
2
I discuss democratic constitutionalism as an alternative to the imperialism of modern constitutional

democracy in Strange Multiplicity, in Chapter 6 of Volume I, Chapter 4 of this volume, and then
more fully in Chapters 8 and 9.
Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker, Introduction to the Conference on Constituent Power and
Constitutional Form (Department of Law, European University Institute, Florence, 2425 March
2006).
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On imperialism
democracy in the narrow sense when I contrast it with constitutional

democracy in the broad sense, which includes non-Western customary
legal and political orders of constitutional forms and constituent powers.4
(1)The formality condition. I take a modern constitutional form to be a
structure of law that has a degree of separation or disembeddedness from the
activities of those who are subject to it and it has the compliance capacity to
structure or even constitute the field of recognition and interaction of the
people subject to it. If it did not have this degree of autonomy or formality,
there would not be the paradoxical relationship between the rule of law
and constituent powers at its centre. Like most historians of Western
constitutionalism, Loughlin and Walker see this disembeddedness to be
distinctive of the modern phase of constitutionalism, perhaps no earlier
than the building of absolute and constitutionally limited centralised states
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In my opinion, historians and
anthropologists are correct to say that many non-Western civilisations
do not have Indigenous constitutional forms of this specifically modern
disembedded type. This difference is usually indicated by calling Western
legal orders mostly formal and non-Western mostly customary, and
ranking modern Western law as superior and more advanced for this
reason (among others). This is not to say that non-modern legal orders do
not have a constitution, since any persisting legal order is a constitution
in the Aristotelian or ancient sense, whether customary or formal. But
in the influential debates over the American and French constitutions (and
the constitutional debates that have followed down to today in Afghanistan
and Iraq), an embedded (customary) constitution was defined as ancient
in contrast to a modern (formal) constitution, and thus said not to be
a constitution at all. This elision was then applied to virtually all nonEuropean legal orders by the nineteenth-century authors of modern international law.5
Let us call this first aspect of modern constitutionalism the formality or
autonomy condition. That is, there are laws that are not immanent norms
4
That is, constitutional democracy appears to refer to any legal and political order that has some kind
of constitution and democracy, and so it appears inclusive of pluralism (constitutional democracy in
the broad sense). Yet, it is then standardly used to refer exclusively to (1) a particular type of modern
constitutional representative government in the West, and (2) particular legal and political orders in
the non-West that are similar in some respects and thus said to be on the historical path to developed
constitutional democracy in the Western sense (constitutional democracy in the narrow sense). This
slippage is intrinsic to the standard usage of the phrase constitutional democracy. The seeming
inclusiveness of the broad sense comes to be predicated only on instances of the narrow sense in the
course of its use.
See Tully, Strange Multiplicity, and section 2 below.
199
within the activities they regulate and which change as subjects interact with
them in day-to-day rule following (as with customary laws), but are external
to them. They constitute or legislate the field of practice, and subjects
comply. If people wish to change the laws, they must go to a separate
institutionalised procedure such as a court, a legislature, and formal amending procedure or judicial review. Kants imposition theory of law is the
classic modern theory of law in this formal sense, yet it goes back to Samuel
Pufendorfs theory of modern law in 1672, the first theoretical reflection on
the post-Westphalian order.6
There are two classes of modern constitutional forms that develop
together in the West: the constitutions of modern states and the constitutions of systems of law beyond the state. The second class today includes not
only what is called international law (the basic laws among modern
constitutional states) but also subsystems of other supra-state bodies of
law that have at least some of the properties of a modern constitutional
form: the basic laws of the EU, NAFTA, the UN Charter of an international
society of states, basic international human rights law, and the vast array of
transnational trade agreements from GATT (1947) to those under the
WTO. In addition, these post-decolonisation constitutional forms were
built on the basis of much older bodies of transnational law that were
developed along with the European constitutional states when they
were formal empires. These are the bodies of imperial law and colonial
law of the European imperial states, and of the old law of nations, ius
commercium and lex mercatoria, which were designed to regulate interimperial competition. Subsystems of these vast systems of law constituted
the respective European empires and their colonies. They were gradually
transformed into the world system of constitutional states and transnational
and international laws in the twentieth century.7
6
Of course, this formality aspect is a feature of much of a modern legal system and not just the
constitution in the narrow sense. As Walker points out, a modern constitution is closely connected to
the legal system it constitutes and thus some properties of constitutional law will also be properties of
some non-constitutional laws. Formality or autonomy is one such shared property: see Neil Walker,
EU Constitutionalism in the State Constitutional Tradition [2006] (European University Institute
Law Working Paper No. 2006/21), available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract 939780 [Accessed 29 August
2007]. I am greatly indebted to Walkers work on constitutionalism and to Loughlin, The Idea of
Public Law for my formulation of the seven features of section 1. For Pufendorf, see my Introduction
to Pufendorf : On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), pp. xivxxxvii.
For an excellent introduction to transnational law since the Second World War, see Peer Zumbansen,
Transnational Law, in Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, ed. J. M. Smits (Cheltenham: Edward
Elgar, 2006), pp. 73854. For its origins in lex Mercatoria (Merchant law) and ius commercium of the
age of empires, see Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Toward a New Legal Common Sense, pp. 20836. The
200
On imperialism
It is thus misleading historically to picture constitutional states developing first and then beginning to experiment with transnational and international constitutional forms in the twentieth century, as legal and political
theorists have done since decolonisation. European constitutional states, as
state empires, developed within global systems of imperial and colonial law
from the beginning, and this whole intertwined complex of two classes
of constitutional forms is the historical basis of the very recent, postdecolonisation global legal order. Indeed, like most nineteenth-century
theorists and legal historians, both Marx and Weber argued that the modern
European constitutional state form was dependent for its peculiar historical
formation on the legal incorporation and exploitation of its colonies, just as
the legal historians of informal imperialism today argue that the current
constitutional form of the great power states is equally dependent on the postcolonial legal incorporation and exploitation of the former colonies by means
of the new systems of international and transnational law (see section 2).
Hence, it is impossible to understand the relationship between modern
constitutional forms and constituent powers unless the imperial and postimperial supra-state constitutional forms are seen as internally related to the
state constitutional forms.8
(2) Constituent political powers. I take constituent powers to be the
powers of humans (individually and collectively) to govern themselves.
Constituent powers refers to these powers in abstraction or separation from
any specific form they take in order to be exercised. They take different forms
in different constitutional forms (since the constitutional form is the form that
the constituent powers take): for example, the people, the nation, representative democracy, modern citizenship, federalism, self-determination, participatory democracy, revolution and so on. Even the concept of constituent
power as popular sovereignty already recognises these powers under a
concept and thus presupposes a form and is one step away from the
distinctly modern idea of constituent power as a capacity or potentiality,
prior to taking on a concrete form, as Loughlin and Walker remind us. This
modern concept of unformed constituent power is of course the condition
of possibility of the modern idea of popular sovereignty and, more radically,
the multitude: that the people or the multitude could stand back from
any constitutional form of organisation of themselves as a specific people
systems of transnational law, especially trade law, function as constitutions in the sense that they
subordinate national constitutions, that is, treat national constitutions as legal regimes under their
jurisdiction (first order rules in H. L. A. Harts sense) and open them to free trade.
This internal relation between constitutional state formation and imperialism has always been a
commonplace in theories of imperialism: see Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism.
201
and bring their form of constitutional organisation into being in some

founding moment or process of deliberation (the procedures of which
would themselves be brought into being by the deliberators, and so on).
Perhaps Rousseau was among the first to explore this paradoxical idea, and
Hardt and Negri among the most recent.9
If we did not have this concept of a constituent power that exists prior to
its actual forms in conjunction with the concept of a disembedded constitutional form, then we would not have the paradoxical relationship between
them that Loughlin and Walker describe, and which is constitutive of the
contingent historical ensemble of nomos and demos we call constitutional
democracy. Indigenous peoples have a different idea of constituent power.
For them the constituent powers of humans (and non-humans) are always
already immanent in the specific forms of transposable habitus they take in
the countless normative relationships of interaction (non-formal customary
laws) that humans and non-humans both bear and transform as they go.10
And if the twentieth-century philosophers of practice from Heidegger to
Pierre Bourdieu, Charles Taylor and Lon Fuller are correct, the modern
systems of formal law and abstract constituent power, which modern
theorists take as their starting point, are actually grounded in everyday
practices of custom and transposable habitus that go without saying,
which Indigenous philosophers take as their starting point.11
The constituent powers of the people are constituted by the two classes of
constitutional forms (state and supra-state) into two main political formations. The first is representative democracy (or constitutional democracy),
with its various forms of modern citizenship, representation and institutionalisation of various constituent powers (legislative, judicial, federative,
9
10
11
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York:
Penguin, 2004). For a genealogy of the constituent powers of citizens within states to which I am
deeply indebted, see Quentin Skinner, States and the Freedom of Citizens, in States and Citizens:
History, Theory, Prospects, eds. Quentin Skinner and Bo Strth (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003); for the incorporation of constituent powers into the form of rights, see Annabel Brett,
The Development of the Idea of Citizens Rights, in States and Citizens.
For this account of Indigenous customary constitutionalism and constituent power internally related
to the law, see the important work of two Indigenous legal scholars: John Borrows, Recovering
Canada: The Resurgence of Indigenous Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Borrows,
Indigenous Legal Traditions (Ottawa: Law Commission of Canada, forthcoming); and Val Napoleon,
Law as Governance: Thinking about Indigenous Legal Orders and Law (Paper prepared for the
National Centre for First Nations Governance, Ottawa, forthcoming).
See the classic formulation in Charles Taylor, To Follow a Rule, in Philosophical Arguments. Like
Taylor, I believe that the best treatment of the internal relationships between a formal system of rules
and the transposable dispositions of the agents who act in, with or against it, which is at the heart of
this chapter, is to be found in Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. For an introduction see
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On imperialism
military, administrative, etc.) within a constitutional state. And the forms of

oppositional constituent powers intrinsic to constitutional representative
democracy are extra-parliamentary opposition, the general strike, direct
action, revolution and so on. The second comprises the mostly nonrepresentative (or distantly representative) forms of organisation of constituent powers characteristic of supra-state constitutional forms. These include
the governing institutions of the old imperial systems, the European congresses and conferences of the nineteenth century (which never included
colonial peoples), the League of Nations, the UN, the Bretton Woods
institutions and WTO, meetings of the G8, and the (more representative)
institutions of the EU.12 And, in democratic opposition, the great decolonisation movements of the twentieth century (and earlier), internationalist
movements, alternative NGOs, the World Social Forum, and global civil
society claim to manifest or represent the constituent powers of the people
and struggle to democratise these supra-state constitutional form and constituent power complexes.
(3) Constitutive sovereigns. It is not possible to understand the field of
interactive relationships between constitutional forms and constituent
powers without seeing a third actor internally related to these first two
features. As Loughlin and Walker point out, modern constitutionalism did
not derive historically from the exercise of constituent powers of sovereign
peoples or multitudes alone. If it had, we would not have the antagonistic
relationship between the two. Rather, as Quentin Skinner has shown,
modern constitutions are also the product of the sovereign in the traditional sense of the ruler: the monarch, emperor, Crown, aristocracy, ruling
class, elite or, more commonly, the sovereign state, in an agonistic relationship with the people. This is the form of constitutive power that is traditionally said to constitute the legal and political order in the West since
Roman law. Constituent power in the sense of popular sovereignty arose in
opposition to sovereignty in this Hobbesian sense and continues to be in a
gaming relationship with it (over the form of the constitution itself, popular
freedoms and constitutional limitations). Even when the sovereign in this
sense can plausibly be said to derive its powers from the consent of the
governed, it is still able to separate itself from dependency on them and
to exercise sovereignty over them and the constitution that is supposed to
limit its power, especially in the great game of foreign power with other
12
The WTO describes itself as an institution of global governance. For its ascension to this role, see
Narlikar, The World Trade Organization.
203
sovereigns, as the realist tradition from Bodin to Morgenthau has always

argued.13
This doctrine of state sovereignty gives rise to yet another kind of
separation: the relative autonomy of the state (or executive) from both the
people and the constitution. It is integral to modern constitutionalism.
A modern constitution, Kant famously argued, does not arise from the
spontaneous interaction of the pre-civil people but requires some kind of
master or legislator to impose law on the crooked timber of the people and
to act without their consent and independent of law in exceptional circumstances until they are civilised by centuries of subjection to civil law. As
Machiavelli and Chomsky add, these constitutive powers are supplemented
with the powers of manufacturing the consent of the people and making
non-constitutional actions appear constitutional in order to gain legitimacy.
Far from disappearing, some contemporary theorists argue like Hobbes that
sovereignty in this sense structures the constitutional form and the form
that constituent powers take within it. That is, the field of constitutional
form and constituent power is really a game between the constitutive
sovereign and the constituent people within and over the constitutional
form (the contract between them) a game that, according to the realists,
the sovereign dominates.14
As with constitutional forms and constituent powers, there are two
corresponding classes of constitutive sovereignty: state sovereignty in its
various forms and the candidates for sovereignty over the various global
constitutional forms listed above. The global sovereigns range from the
competing imperial powers in the colonial age to the informal sovereigns
today, such as a single superpower (the United States since 1989), the G8 or
G20, a coalition or balance of civilised, advanced or democratic states, the
Bretton Woods institutions and WTO, the transnational corporations
empowered by trade agreements under the WTO, an empowered UN, or
some combination of these contenders.
(4) Constituent productive and defensive powers. I have been writing as if
constituent powers (feature 2) consist only of political powers, that is,
powers of self-government that are said to be delegated or alienated to
representative institutions and also exercised directly in public spheres. But
13
14
Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. II, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1978). See also, Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical
Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Martin
Loughlin, Ten Tenets of Sovereignty, in Sovereignty in Transition, ed. Neil Walker (Oxford: Hart,
2003).
See James Tully, Diverse Enlightenments, Economy and Society 32(3), 2003: 485505.
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On imperialism
this is too narrow. As Locke, Marx and Weber insisted, the constituent
powers of the people that are institutionalised by a modern constitutional
system of laws consist of three distinct types of powers: (i) political power or
the powers of self-government (feature 2); (ii) labour or productive powers;
and (iii) the powers to protect oneself and others, or military and police
power. Modern constitutions differentially distribute these three types of
constituent powers into three distinct sets of legal institutions of modern
societies: political, economic, and police and military.15
Labour power, the second type of power just itemised, is exercised by
selling it for a wage on the market to competing national or multinational
corporations that manage its exercise and extract a profit. These capitalist
forms of constituent labour power, private property in the means of
production and contractual relations are stipulated by the constitutional
forms of state and international legal regimes and enforced by the corresponding sovereigns. This form of organisation of productive power is
distinctive to modern constitutionalism, where humans have been dispossessed of their access to the land and independent means of production, first
with the enclosures within Europe and then with the dispossession of the
non-European peoples of their Indigenous legal and political control over
their resources and labour during the spread of Western imperialism and its
legal orders, as Marx and Hobson concurred.16 Just as one can think of
political powers being either delegated or alienated to the representative
institutions, so too can one think of economic powers being either delegated
or alienated to the capitalist corporations, as Weber neatly demonstrated.
Productive powers are also conceptualised in the same abstract way as
political powers: that is, as capacities capable of being shaped and exercised
in a multiplicity of forms within the corporatised division of labour.17
The third type of constituent powers, the powers of self- and otherdefence, is alienated to the police and the military-industrial complex in
modern constitutional formations. Although rebellions were fought in the
name of no standing armies in the seventeenth century, by the early
nineteenth century every modern state had a constitutionally protected
15
16
17
See James Tully, An Introduction to Lockes Philosophy, in An Approach to Political Philosophy:

Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Van Creveld, The Rise and
Decline of the State.
J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study [1902] (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005); Karl Marx, Capital:
A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 873942. For a recent history of
the legal dispossession of colonised peoples, see John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making
of the Modern World, 16501900 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003).
James Tully, Rights in Abilities, in An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts
205
permanent military complex.18 These complexes are standardly connected

to the most advanced research and development institutions, the largest
commercial firms, a secure tax base, a permanent supply of recruits through
the leve en masse, the draft and, more recently, the states purchase of
private armies on the market, a separate class of influential militarypolitical
leaders, naval and army bases throughout the old European empires and
the paramount global military system of the United States that claims to
exercise full spectrum dominance of the planet today. As Montesquieu
foresaw in 1748, this peculiar formation of protective powers is caught
in an ever-escalating arms race with other constitutional states and, since
Decolonisation, an expanding arms-sales industry to dependent and indebted
former colonies and proxy states. As Locke warned in 1675, the resulting
power imbalance between the permanently armed sovereign state and the
legally disarmed people undermines the rough equality between the people
and their representatives that was the guarantee of a free and constitutionally
bound polity, opening the people to abuse by their own government and to
unlimited military adventures abroad without an effective counterbalance.
Yet, because the people always desire to be free of oppression, the system is a
recipe for inevitable wars and revolts.19
Just as constituent political powers are organised in different governance
institutions within constitutional states and supra-state organisations (feature 2), so too are economic and military constituent powers. The Bretton
Woods institutions, the G8 and the most powerful transnational corporations govern economic power through the supra-state systems of trade and
finance law.20 The United States now claims to exercise full spectrum
military dominance over the worlds forms of constituent military power
to protect democracy and free trade, multilaterally and in accord with
international law and the Security Council if possible (juridical dominance),
but unilaterally and without the law if necessary (executive dominance).21
18
19
20
21
Volker Berghahn, Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 18611979 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1981); William Hardy McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology,
Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
This line of argument was put forward in an anonymous pamphlet believed to be by Locke, A Letter
from a Person of Quality to a Friend in Country [1675] and is repeated in Two Treatises of Government
[1690]: see Tully, An Introduction to Lockes Philosophy, at pp. 3747. For Montesquieu on the
arms race, see Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws [1748], eds. Anne M. Cohler,
Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
Bk 13, 17.
The trade agreements under the WTO are seen as global constitutions and charters of rights of
transnational corporations: see Shrybman, The World Trade Organization, pp. 118.
The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America. The new National
Security Strategy of March 2006 is similar.
206
On imperialism
I would like to suggest that we cannot understand the dynamics and

paradoxes of the relationship between modern constitutional forms and
constituent powers unless we include in the field of interaction these two
dimensions of constituent power (productive power and military power).
I concede that the monopolisation of economic constituent power by
networked multinationals and international legal regimes and the monopolisation of powers of self- and other-defence by huge networked military
complexes are considered beyond question in the dominant democratic and
constitutional theories today, except for a few notable exceptions. However,
the global popular protests from decolonisation to the movements against
the current imperial wars in the Middle East and against the neo-liberal
form of free trade imperialism today are over precisely the present concentration and exercise of these two forms of constitutionalised constituent
powers and the inability of the available forms of political power to make
any significant difference whatsoever. And this is not surprising, for the lowintensity representative democratic institutions and modern constitutional
formations have been powerfully shaped and formed by the parallel
de-politicalisation and concentration of these other two forms of constituent power. Indeed, for many social scientists today, these two concentrations of economic and military power have not only disempowered the
people but also usurped the de facto role of the sovereign within state and
global formations.22 Therefore, an analysis of constitutional form and
constituent power would be out of touch with the populist global constituent discomfort with the existing order if these two types of constituent
power were left unexamined.23
(5) Governmentalit. All three types of constituent powers of individuals
and collectivities are guided and habituated into their various constituent
forms of subjectivity by the vast repertoires of modern techniques of
governmentalit. We know from Weber, Foucault, Loughlin and the
Governmentality school that these techniques of modern subjectification
cannot be reduced to or derived from the sovereign state, constitution,
the rule of law, representative government and citizenship regimes, or the
self-fashioning practices the people and peoples apply to themselves.
The historical development of dispersed regimes of governmentality within
modern and advanced liberal constitutional states has been well researched.
22
23
See, e.g., Harvey, The New Imperialism.

See the similar argument of Santos, The World Social Forum: A Users Manual. For a survey of populist
global resistance movements against these two forms of power, see Amoore, ed., The Global Resistance
Reader.
207
The parallel history of regimes of formal colonial governmentalit and the

more recent post-colonial governmentalit by various informal means of
global governance has not received as much attention.24
(6) Four theses on interaction. The dynamic relationship between constitutional forms and constituent powers is a function of the complex
interactions among the actors within and against the constitutional formations. To summarise, I outlined the two classes of constitutional forms
under which constituent powers are configured into constitutional actors
(the state and transnational classes of feature 1); constituent political powers
(feature 2), constitutive sovereign authorities (feature 3), constituent productive and defensive powers (feature 4), and regimes of governmentalit
(feature 5). Loughlin and Walker summarise the four main types of interaction of constituent-power actors with their corresponding constitutional
forms as follows.
In the first type of interaction the actors all exercise their political,
economic and protective powers more or less routinely in accord with
the two constitutional formations and their corresponding institutions of
constituent powers, then the interaction approximates what Loughlin and
Walker call the juridical containment thesis. That is, the constitution
founds and structures the exercise of constituent powers, as in modern
liberal theories of constitutional democracy. In the second type of interaction, the people seek to change the particular constitutional forms and the
corresponding ways their constituent powers are contained by exercising
their popular sovereignty within a modern constitutional and democratic
order (and within its traditions of interpretation), either by constitutional
reform or democratic revolution. Then, the whole interaction accords
with the co-originality and mutual articulation thesis. That is, the constitutional form and the constituent powers of democratic self-rule are
equiprimordial (equally basic), as in many theories of democratic constitutionalism.25 Thirdly, when the people subject to a constitutional form
see themselves as a multitude (an as yet unorganised and unrecognised
potential agent) behind the whole constitutionalconstituent formation
and strive to exercise all three constituent powers together, overthrow the
regime and bring into being a new kind of constitutional formation, which
in turn must be subject to on-going constituent transformation (so the
24
25
See Ayers, Demystifying Democratization, and the now classic article on colonial governmentalit,
Pels, The Anthropology of Colonialism. For a review of the limits, compromises and failures of
colonial governmentalit, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), and section 3 below.
208
On imperialism
multitude remains sovereign over the constitutional form to which it

subjects itself), then interaction accords with the radical sovereignty or
self-creation thesis, as in radical democratic theories.26 When, in the fourth
type, diverse individuals and groups exercise their constituent powers in
countless ways within and against the constitutionalised forms of constituent powers to which they are subject, in the hopes of modifying or transforming them agonistically, as they proceed, or if they invent new forms of
constituent organisations (such as networks) yet are unable to transform the
hegemony of the prevailing sovereigns and constitutional forms, interaction
is in accord with the irresolution thesis. It is irresolvable because the
subalterns are able to modify but not to transform the unequal relations in
which they act.27 The irresolution thesis in this rather pessimistic form
characterises fairly accurately the way subalternised states and non-state
actors are constrained to interact in the current informal imperial order, as
we saw in the introduction to this chapter.28 While this list leaves out a
crucially important form of interaction, which I highlight in the final
section (acting otherwise), it nevertheless encapsulates fairly well the
major forms of interaction characteristic of modern constitutional
democracy.
Of course, at the same time, the respective constitutive sovereigns of
modern constitutional states and of global constitutional formations have a
repertoire of constitutional and extra-constitutional ways of re-naming and
responding to the irruptions of popular sovereignty, radical sovereignty and
agonistic irresolution domestically and internationally, and of bringing
them in line with the containment thesis or a manageable form of the
mutual articulation thesis. Indeed, we can think of these four types of game
of interaction between constituent powers and constitutive sovereigns
within and over constitutional forms as co-extensive with, and the driving
force of, the reign of modern constitutional democracy.
(7) Discursive formations. As we have seen, this complex of constitutional
forms and constituent powers has a dynamic history. This history is
portrayed as a dynamic set of world-historical processes that coordinate
the previous six features: respectively, constitutionalisation, representative
democratisation, centralisation of sovereignty, economic and military
modernisation, governmentalisation, and citizenisation in both the state
26
28
Hardt and Negri, Empire. 27 Christodoulidis, Constitutional Irresolution.

But see the final section below for my reformulation of this thesis in tandem with the co-articulation
thesis. For a more optimistic version of the irresolution thesis, see Jutta Brunne and Stephen Toope,
International Law and Constructivism: Elements of an Interactional Theory of International Law,
Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 39(1), 2000: 1974.
209
and international spheres. These so-called processes with their purported

necessary logics of development bear a number of descriptiveevaluative
names that serve to legitimate them and put them beyond question:
civilisation, development, modernisation, decolonisation, globalisation,
democratisation, opening to free trade and so on. They have their origins
in Europe but they sweep up the rest of humanity, which is portrayed as
at lower stages of historical development and in need of Western imperial
aid, and gradually make the world over in accord with constitutional
democracy (in its various iterations over time).29 This telos is defined in
different ways by writers such as Vattel, Smith, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill,
Lauterpacht, Westlake, Hartmann, Wheaton, Wilson, Rostow, Fukuyama,
Friedman, Hardt and Negri, and Habermas, but, as Herder objected to
Kants model, it is always posited as a universal and cosmopolitan end-point
for one and all.30 These legitimating meta-narratives are woven into the
horizons of modern humanities and social and legal sciences, and into the
day-to-day administration of all aspects of constitutional democracies, so
deeply that even critics accept them as the bounds of reasonable argument.
Like the other six aspects, these world-process discursive formations have
been predicated on both modernising constitutional states and their imperialising projects simultaneously since the early modern period.31 Again,
I would like to suggest that one cannot adequately analyse the dynamics of
an ensemble of constitutional forms and constituents powers without
taking into account the discursive formations employed in its operations.
29
30
31
Of course these six features were not called constitutional democracy until recently, after decolonisation and the emergence of a world of formally equal nation-states. But the present usage of this
phrase makes it appear that the contingent histories of the six features make up aspects of underlying
processes that necessarily lead to constitutional democracy as the end-point. And the contingent
histories can be arranged so they appear to illustrate the stages of their development and so that those
at the highest stage can see constitutional democracys essential aspects. As I mentioned in the
introduction to this chapter, this is the rhetorical function of the phrase in its narrow sense. But it is
also important to remember that we can also arrange descriptions of customary legal and political
associations so that they appear as natural extensions of constitutional democracy (by showing, for
example, that they perform similar functions); then modern constitutional democracy can be seen as a
particular instance of a much broader class of constitutional and democratic association, rather than
as the universal end-point. The resulting legal and political pluralism is what I call common
constitutionalism in Strange Multiplicity.
For critical analyses of these legitimating discourses of imperialism, see Chapter 1, this volume;
Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, pp. 179352; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; and
Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation.
Pagden, Lords of All the World.
210
On imperialism
2 the imperial roles of constitutional
democracy
The previous section set out seven aspects of the modern arrangement of
constituent powers and constitutional forms commonly called constitutional democracy. I suggested that it cannot be adequately understood by
focusing exclusively on its histories within Western states. It should be set in
the broader context of its global spread by means of Western imperialism in
its formal (colonial) and informal (free trade) phases, which was briefly
summarised in the introduction to this chapter. I then brought this broader
imperial context into the history of state formation by distinguishing
between two intertwined classes of constitutional forms (state and imperial), and then the two classes of the following five features. Feature 7
showed how they are integrated in the grand discursive formations (or
meta-narratives) of constitutional democratic modernisation. I will now
bring together these imperial dimensions of constitutional democracy in a
very brief historical synopsis.
Since the early-modern period, European states have asserted a crucial
eighth feature of modern constitutional democracy: the imperial right of
European states and their companies to trade freely in non-European
societies and the duty to civilise non-European peoples, together with the
correlative duty of hospitality of non-European peoples to open themselves
to trade and civilisation. If Indigenous peoples resist and defend their own
constitutional forms and constituent powers and civilisations, and thus
violate the international duty of hospitality, the imperial powers have the
right and duty to impose coercively the conditions of trade, hospitality and
civilisation; namely, the appropriate features of modern constitutional
forms and constituent powers. The right and two duties in their many
formulations from Francisco de Vitoria through Locke and Kant to the
GATT/WTO, the World Bank and the norm of democratisation under
international law serve to legitimate the coercive imposition and protection of the conditions of the Western imperialisation on the non-West.
I will call the right and two duties the imperial right.32
32
For an introduction to the complex history of the imperial right, see Anghie, Imperialism; Tully,
Strange Multiplicity; Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations; and Pagden, Lords of All the World.
For the norm of democratisation under international law today, see Marks, The Riddle of All
Constitutions. A well-known and illustrative example of the duty of hospitality of non-Europeans to
open themselves to European trade, or face punishment under international law, prior to nineteenthcentury international law, is Kants cosmopolitan right and duty of hospitality the third definitive
article of Perpetual Peace. There is a long history of this cosmopolitan right and correlative duty of
openness, referred to as ius commercium, in the earlier law of nature on which Kant draws.
211
The imperial right has been exercised in three major ways over the
last half millennium.33 The first is the implantation of European settler
colonies in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. In these cases of
replication imperialism, the rudimentary colonial structures of modern
constitutional forms and constituent powers were imposed over the legal
and political systems of the Indigenous peoples, dispossessing them of
their territories and usurping their governments, by force or dishonoured
treaties. Approximately 80 per cent of the Indigenous population, which
was larger than Europes in 1492, was exterminated by 1900. The remaining
Indigenous peoples were subjected to forced assimilation or removed to tiny
reserves with limited powers of local self-government and ruled despotically
by ministries of Indigenous affairs. When the colonies freed themselves
from the British, Spanish and Portuguese empires, they retained the legal
structures of the colonial period and continued to exert and extend imperial
sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and their territories throughout the
four continents.34
The second method of constitutional imperialisation is indirect colonial
rule. The imperial powers establish a small colonial administration or
trading company to rule over a much larger Indigenous population indirectly, by establishing a formal infrastructure of imperial law and lex
mercatoria while also preserving and modifying the existing Indigenous
customary constitutions and constituent powers so that resources and
labour are privatised and opened to trade, labour discipline, investment
and contract law dominated by the European trading companies. Once
this legal system is in place, resistance is illegal under their own laws. As
Hobson explained in Imperialism in 1902, the various means include
recognising local rulers as quasi-sovereigns and making unequal treaties
with them, civilising or westernising local elites and making them dependent on imperial economic and military power and bribes, dividing and
conquering opposition, training the Indigenous armies to protect the
imperial system of property and trade law and to fight proxy wars for
them, inciting resistance so the trading companies can claim compensation
for damages and lost profits (as in Iraq after 2003), and so on. This is the
major way the imperial right was exercised in India, Ceylon, Africa prior to
33
34
For an analysis of these forms of imperialism, see Doyle, Empires, pp. 3050.
Paul Havemann, ed. Indigenous Peoples Rights in Australia, Canada and New Zealand (Oxford:
212
On imperialism
its violent recolonisation after 1885, and the Middle East in the twentieth
century.35
The third way informal or free trade imperialism can be seen as one
step beyond indirect rule. The imperial power permits the self-rule, and
eventually self-determination, of Indigenous peoples within a protectorate
or sphere of influence while exercising informal paramountcy (hegemony)
to induce them to open their resources, labour and markets to free trade by
establishing the appropriate legal and political forms, thereby combining
empire and liberty, the oldest rallying cry of British and US imperialism.
The informal ways and means include the recognition of quasi-sovereignty
and unequal treaties, economic, military and aid dependency, bribes,
sanctions, the civilisation of the natives by voluntary and religious organisations and by Western legal, political, economic and military experts, and
threats of military intervention and actual military intervention if all else
fails. These diverse means of open door or intervention imperialism, as it
is also called, replace and often supersede historically earlier formal colonisation or indirect rule (which laid the groundwork). The ultimate guarantee is the establishment of small yet overwhelming naval and military
bases (originally coaling stations) established throughout the imperialised
world, such as Guantnamo Bay (1901), that can threaten or actually
intervene on a moments notice if subaltern peoples threaten to take
democratic control of their own resources or foreign companies. The
British empire and the United States illustrated the superiority of informal
imperialism over the expensive old colonial system during the nineteenth
century in their competitive free trade paramountcy over the independent
former colonies of Latin America (with frequent interventions). As I mentioned in the introductory section, it has grown to become the dominant
form of imperialism since decolonisation and the United States now has
over 725 military bases strategically located around the world.36
The different formulations of the imperial right were brought together in
an authoritative form in the European and US construction of modern
international law in the nineteenth century. As Gerrit Gong, Martti
Koskenniemi, Edward Keene and Antony Anghie have shown in their
remarkable studies of the creation of modern international law, the centrepiece of this project is the standard of civilisation. Civilisation refers to
35
36
For the Middle East, see Fisk, The Great War for Civilization; and Doyle, Empires, for a comprehensive survey.
For the rise of US-led informal imperialism, see Bacevich, American Empire; Johnson, Sorrows of
Empire.
213
both a set of world-historical processes and an end-point: namely, the seven

aspects of constitutional democracy outlined in section 1. (After decolonisation and the criticism of the imperial uses of civilisation by the new Third
World states at the United Nations, the term civilisation was replaced by
modernisation and democratisation, although civilisation has come back
into use.)37
The modern constitutional state with its constituent powers (the seven
aspects) was defined as the uniquely civilised and universal legal and
political order. Only European states (and the United States in 1895) met
the standard and were thus recognised as sovereign under international law.
The complex and overlapping legal and political associations of the nonWestern peoples who had been colonised over the previous four hundred
years were defined in contrast as customary and uncivilised. Hence they
were not recognised under international law but were subject to the imperial
law of the respective sovereign powers. In Kants influential formulation,
the very fact that the so-called uncivilised peoples lacked a modern constitutional form was asserted to be a threat to civilised states and thus to give
them the right to impose Western law, by treaty or by removing them from
their traditional territories if possible, or, if they failed to submit, to employ
coercion.38 Since openness to free trade, acceptance of corresponding domestic and international legal orders, and a Western territorial state form were
defining aspects of a civilised society, if an Indigenous society tried to retain
customary jurisdiction and sovereignty over its own association, it proved
itself to be uncivilised and a civilised legal order was imposed in one of the
three ways described above.39 The few non-Western civilisations that were
too strong to be bullied in this way were brought into or alongside the club of
great powers and restructured accordingly (as with China and Japan).
The right of the self-proclaimed civilised, imperial powers to extend
colonial and international modern constitutional regimes around the
world was correlated with a sacred duty to civilise the Indigenous peoples
under their rule. Non-Western civilisations, many of which are older and
more complex than the aggressive Western states, were scientifically
37
38
39
Gong, The Standard of Civilization; Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society; Koskenniemi, The Gentle
Civilizer of Nations; Anghie, Imperialism.
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Political Writings, p. 98. See Anghie, Imperialism, pp. 2957, for
the significance of this justification of pre-emptive intervention in the context of the imperial War on
Terror today.
Gong, The Standard of Civilization, pp. 1415, summarises the features of the standard of
civilization. The openness to trade and subordination to Western free trade laws is the first feature.
This fundamental feature is repeated in the latest trade agreements under the WTO, in the MostFavoured Nation Rule, which derives from GATT (1947).
214
On imperialism
classified at various stages of historical backwardness or underdevelopment

relative to the civilised imperial states and subjected to calibrated techniques of civilisation and modernisation. The civilising duty involved, first
and foremost, imposing the civilising Western laws over Indigenous legal
order, dispossessing or marginalising or transforming their customary forms
of cooperative ownership, work and governance, and introducing capitalist
corporations, foreign investment, labour discipline, modern contractual
relationships and a territorially based colonial political order. The second
dimension of the duty to govern those who were too uncivilised to govern
themselves was to apply colonial governmentalit in detail to shape and form
their forms of subjectivity so they would become able to take on, in stages,
civilised forms of self-government and competitive individualism of a
modern, foreign-controlled capitalist economy in a global system led by
the developed states.40
International law was powerless to enforce this civilising duty on the
imperial states in the nineteenth century. Although it was clearly in the
long-term interest of a stable, juridical imperial system, the competing
imperial states reverted to the short-term executive strategy of war, pillage,
slavery, hyper-exploitation, genocide and destruction in Africa, and the
tropics more generally, after the Berlin Conference of 1885 (similar to the
atrocities in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon 118 years later).41 This unbridled
imperial competition culminated in the First World War, the great war for
civilisation.42 In 1919 the great powers realised that they could not continue
the mutually destructive great game of competing militarily over the
domination and exploitation of the non-Western world. They tried to set
up a League of Nations and an international legal order that would, firstly,
force the great powers into a more cooperative and law-based form of
imperialism, and secondly, establish a shared, international project of
civilising the natives and guiding them to self-rule. The first project, which
Hobson and Kautsky feared as the coming cooperative hyper-imperialism,
was not achieved until after the Second World War, the establishment of
the United Nations, decolonisation and the Cold War triumph of the
Western powers over the socialist states. The second project took the
form of the Mandate System under the League of Nations. The colonised
40
41
42
In addition to the excellent treatment of the sacred duty of civilisation by Gong, Keene, Koskenniemi
and Anghie, see the classic critique of it in Marx, Capital, pp. 93142; and Hobson, Imperialism,
pp. 113327.
Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, pp. 98166, for the new imperialism of the 1890s, and
Gregory, The Colonial Present, for the new imperialism of this century.
John H. Morrow, The Great War: An Imperial History (London: Routledge, 2004).
215
peoples were classified into three main uncivilised types, and techniques of
modernisation were applied (irregularly) by the respective mandatory imperial states as they increased resource exploitation, especially in the oil-rich
Middle East. These processes of preparing colonial peoples for Westernstyle self-government continued during the Trustee System of the United
Nations and, after formal independence, the duty to civilise took the form
of the trade agreements of the WTO and imposition of neo-liberal structural adjustment and privatisation programmes by the World Bank and
IMF, and the norm of democratisation under international law.43
The great decolonisation movements of the middle of the century
temporarily disrupted these two projects. The former colonies tried to free
themselves from both formal and informal imperialism, to form a Third
World not aligned with Western or Soviet imperialism, and to continue
to develop their own distinctive constitutional forms, constituent powers
and civilisations (as both Fanon and Gandhi hoped). However, the former
colonies were constrained by the informal means available to the great
powers to exercise their constituent powers of self-determination in accord
with modern constitutional forms and constituent powers, open themselves
to free trade dominated by the great powers and submit to international
legal regimes that denied them permanent sovereignty over their own
resources or face military intervention and regime change. This modernisation and dependency project was often carried through by the Third
World westernised elites, corrupted by massive economic and military
dependency, against the resistance of the majority of their own people,
who dreamed of creating their own democracies, rather than the lowintensity nationalist democracies they were forced to accept.44 The resulting
resource-rich petrotyrannies, sweat-shop dictatorships and strategically
important regional dependencies remain unstable failed states as a direct
result of their continuing subjection to informal imperial manipulation: the
43
44
See Anghie, Imperialism, pp. 115272; Ayers, Demystifying Democratization; Marks, The Riddle of
All Constitutions; Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, pp. 465509; Shrybman, The World
Trade Organization. For the Mandate System, see Michael D. Callahan, Mandates and Empire: The
League of Nations and Africa, 19141931 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1999); and Callahan,
A Sacred Trust: The League of Nations and Africa, 19291946 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004).
See Duara, ed., Decolonization. This history explains why Indigenous peoples and Indigenous laws
are used in broad and narrow senses. In the broad sense, Indigenous peoples refers to all nonEuropean peoples who have been subject to Western imperialism. As Western-style formal legal
systems were imposed and decolonisation carried out, the peoples who acquired statehood (and were
thus considered civilised) ceased to be called Indigenous. Indigenous peoples came to be used
narrowly of those peoples who are subject to the continuing internal colonisation of the original
settler states and the new post-decolonisation states; that is, the Fourth World of 250 million people
today.
216
On imperialism
dependent elites are constrained by their dependency to suppress the

democratic aspirations of their people to control their own resources and
work conditions; the people are driven to violence in self-defence; this is
called failure and terrorism; and as Locke predicted45 intervention
follows.46
This synopsis brings us up to the global network of informal imperialism
I set out in the introductory section, now with the roles of the institutions
of constitutional democracy added to it. The result is that the low-intensity
constitutional democratisation of the former colonies and the quasiconstitutional transnational and international legal regimes that override
them if necessary now provide the legal and political basis of a new phase of
Western imperialism. With the international power of the great powers
concentrated in the Security Council, the institutions of global governance,
NATO and the US full spectrum dominance, these unequal sovereigns are
able to exercise legalized hegemony over the nominally sovereign yet
substantively subalternised former colonies.47 The resulting inequalities,
extreme poverty, dispossession, irresponsible foreign control and destructiveness are greater under post-colonial imperialism than under colonialism.48 Yet the only official debate in the West is whether global rule will be
primarily executive-based and unilateral (the current policy of the United
States and United Kingdom) or primarily law-based and multilateral (the
European alternative).49 The shared historical foundation of these two
historically intertwined strategies (warfare and lawfare) in the imperialism
of constitutional democracy we have surveyed goes without saying.50
3 beyond imperialism: democratic
constitutionalism
In summary, constitutional democracy, consisting of the eight features
outlined in sections 1 and 2, plays three main roles in Western imperialism.
45
46
47
49
50
See note 20 above.

Gills, Rocamora and Wilson, eds., Low Intensity Democracy; and Wendt and Barnett, Dependent
State Formation. For more recent surveys, see Chomsky, Failed States; Gregory, The Colonial Present;
Petras and Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked; and Fisk, The Great War for Civilization.
Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States. 48 Seabrook, The No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty.
Peter Swan, American Empire or Empires? Alternative Juridifications of the New World Order, in
Empires Law: The American Imperial Project and the War to Remake the World, ed. Amy Bartholomew
(London: Pluto Press, 2006). Swan argues for a renewed European imperialism based in the EU.
It is worth noting that these two strategies or wings within the shared meta-narratives and
institutions of constitutional democracy have been a feature of Western imperialism for over a
century. The debate over the new imperialism today is very similar to the debate over the new
imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century.
217
(i) Low-intensity constitutional democratisation has been imposed on nonWestern peoples without their consent or democratic participation. (ii)
These colonies and post-colonial replicas are then subject and subordinate
to a cluster of regimes of transnational and international laws over which
they have no or little say. (iii) These regimes in turn are governed by the
most powerful constitutive sovereign states through global institutions and
military networks in which the governed have no or little say, even though
they are the vast majority of the worlds population. All three dimensions
are imperial and abhorrent in their inequalities and injustices, yet each is
composed of aspects of constitutional democracy in its dominant narrow
sense.
How can these three dimensions of constitutional democracy be
de-imperialised? A democratic answer is to work to bring the basic constitutional and constituent structures of each of the three dimensions under
the participatory shared authority of those who are subject to them. This
is the basic idea of democratic freedom and democratic constitutionalism:
the laws must always be open to the criticism, negotiation and modification
of those who are the subjects of them as they follow them. As we saw
in my discussion of feature 2 in section 1, this participatory and reflexive
freedom of negotiating the norms to which we are subject as we go is at the
heart of non-modern, customary constitutional forms and immanent constituent powers. The formalisation and disembedding of modern constitutionalism and constituent powers displaced this freedom to representative
institutions.51 The imposition of proto-constitutional democracy under
imperialism has attenuated this representative freedom further in the lowintensity democratisation of colonial and post-colonial regimes. And,
finally, the transnational and international legal regimes weaken the participatory freedom of the governed even more. Yet, as we also saw, even formal
systems of law are grounded in everyday customary practices underlying
the formal institutions of law-making, law-following, law-enforcing, lawinterpreting and law-adjudicating in which the laws are negotiated within
limits in the course of interaction. So the project of democratic constitutionalism is not one of bringing even more cumbersome representative
institutions to bear from the outside. It is to exploit and expand the existing
yet severely limited field of possibilities of direct participatory freedom (the
exercise of constituent powers) within and against the constitutional forms
to which the governed are now subject, directly or indirectly, at the very
sites where these unjustly constrain their ability to exercise shared authority
51
For this history, see Chapter 2, this volume.
218
On imperialism
over the conditions of their activities. This is not the freedom to protest
against imperialism or to confront it directly in a revolution aimed
at overthrowing it. The co-optation of decolonisation revolutions and
protests by informal imperial means has caused anti-imperialists to turn
to these concrete practices of democratic constitutionalism: of organising
non-imperially and modifying the imperial dimensions of constitutional
democracy from within. Referring back to my discussion of feature 6 in
section 1, this turn is a reformulation of the kind of limited freedom depicted
in the irresolution thesis or, conversely, a more realistic reformulation of the
co-articulation thesis under real-world conditions of hegemonsubaltern
relations (the fourth and second theses described under feature 6).52
As we know from the history of imperialism, such practical attempts to
democratise constitutional democracy will be met with official opposition
and force.53 However, this response further exposes the false and antidemocratic premise of imperial constitutional democracy. In my discussion
of the imperial right in section 2, we saw that the premise has always been
that the non-Western other is uncivil and so untrustworthy because they
are not already subject to a structure of civil law and the civilising effects of
subjection. Therefore, before democratic dialogue and negotiation over
legal and political arrangements can begin, a structure of Western law has
to be imposed. Constitutionalism precedes democracy. This is the juridical
containment thesis. But this premise is false and the cause of endless
imperial wars.
Non-Western peoples have always been subject to their own nomoi and
demoi and civilised by them in their different ways. There is thus no reason
why democratic dialogue and negotiation cannot precede and ground the
negotiation of shared constitutionalism. The willingness to enter into
dialogue with others in this disarmed, open and trusting way generates
trust, as Gandhi and Hans-Georg Gadamer have shown in practice and
theory, whereas the coercive imposition of the law of one over the other,
backed up by the ever-present threat of more military intervention, destroys
trust and generates ressentiment, as the young Nietzsche saw.54 It is rather
the imperial powers that cannot be trusted to respect the others laws and
52
53
54
This turn to concrete constituent practices of freedom within and against imperial relations of power
was introduced after decolonisation by Frantz Fanon, Partha Chaterjee, Edward Said and Michel
Foucault. For a fuller theoretical account, see Mike Simpson, The Creative Insurgence of Subjugated
Practices: Non-Capitalist Practices and the Interstices of Capitalist Modernity, MA thesis, University
of Victoria, 2006.
See, e.g., Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty; Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival.
For Gandhi and his immense influence, see Thomas Weber, Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For Gadamers argument that this is the only
219
ways, but to misrecognise and delegitimate them as mere customs,

uncivilised, savage, the lawless state of nature, terra nullius, the Wild
West, terrorist regimes or rogue states and then intervene and subvert
them. This has been the structure of argument and practice of the imperial
right since the sixteenth century.55
What can be done? Despite the destructiveness of imperialism, nonWestern customary legal and political normative orders have not been
completely destroyed or superseded, as the Western meta-narratives confidently continue to predict. Western expansion has not been as total as its
defenders and critics assume. In section 2 it was noted that imperial rule is
always parasitic on the persistence of non-Western customary legal and
political practices for its daily operation because it has to rely on the indirect
and informal collaboration of the subaltern, that is, the majority of the
worlds population. This practical room to manoeuvre has enabled the
diverse peoples of the world to act otherwise to some limited extent: that
is, to live creatively in accord with their own ever-changing customary
constitutional forms and constituent powers within the interstices of imperial constitutional formations to vastly varying degrees.56 Even the most
relentlessly imperialised people the Indigenous peoples of the Americas
have preserved their normative legal and political and civilisational practices
and are now enacting a renaissance or resurgence of them within and
against continuing internal colonisation.57 Hence, as legal pluralists show,
there are subjugated and overlooked alternative worlds of customary law
and democracy that exist in the day-to-day practices of millions of people,
despite the overarching hegemony and seeming inescapability of the particular Western form of constitutional democracy.58 As Boaventura de Sousa
Santos argues, existing legal and political pluralism is neither to be rejected
as uncivilised nor accepted uncritically, but brought into critical dialogues
55
56
57
58
genuine (non-imperial) form of dialogue, see Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 34162. For
Nietzsche, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Means to Real Peace, in Human All Too Human: A Book
for Free Spirits [1878] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 284, pp. 3801.
Anghie, Imperialism, pp. 1331.
The limit case is where a colonised people have been so totally assimilated that they take on the
customary practices, habitus and forms of subjectivity that undergird formal constitutional democracy in the Western world. This is much less common than is supposed by modernisation theories,
and the space for living alternative civilisations within it, which often go unnoticed by Western
observers, is much greater than is supposed. Even within the West, culturally diverse peoples act in
culturally different ways to a very large extent within shared legal and political orders, and constantly
negotiate the boundaries. On diversity of rule-negotiating in the EU, see Antje Wiener, The Invisible
Constitution of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Volume I, Chapter 6.
For references to the reassertion of legal and political pluralism, see Borrows, Recovering Canada and
Indigenous Legal Traditions; and Napoleon, Law as Governance.
Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures; Santos, Toward a New Legal Common Sense, pp. 85154.
220
On imperialism
within and over different forms of organising shared authority non imperially, both locally and globally dialogues that include the non-imperial
aspects of Western constitutional democracy.59 And these experiments are
the growing basis of non-imperial forms of global networking that seek to
provide a living democracy alternative to the current constitutional forms
of the WB, IMF and WTO.60
Analogous spaces of democratic freedom exist in Western countries.
Millions of westerners refuse to support the imperial dimensions of constitutional democracy and strive to create non-imperial legal and political
ways of interacting with partners in the rest of the world, gradually
de-imperialising constitutional democracy from within.61 Following the
examples of Gandhi, Vandana Shiva, Johan Galtung, Fritz Schumacher,
Arne Naess, Kofi Annan, Thich Nhat Hanh and countless other mentors,
they are building networks of globalisation in which the constitutional form
of the network is based on the on-going democratic and non-violent
exercise of the constituent powers of the partners who subject themselves
to it.62 These experiments in democratic constitutionalism include cooperatives rather than corporations, fair trade rather than free trade, local democracy, non-violent dispute resolution rather than the recourse to arms, deep
ecology, mutual aid rather than aid tied to privatisation and military bases,
and continuing dialogues among the civilisations involved.63 Despite the
horrors of present-day imperialism, and perhaps partly because of them,
there are arguably more activities of creating non-imperial customary normative orders and of modifying the more formal imperial normative orders
from the inside than at any other time in the long history of non-imperial
and anti-imperial movements.
59
60
61
62
63
Santos, Toward a New Legal Common Sense. Santos sees the World Social Forum as a space for this
kind of critical dialogue.
Jerry Mander and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, eds., Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples Resistance to
Economic Globalization (San Francisco: International Forum on Globalization, 2005).
For Gandhis influence on most of these mentors, see Weber, Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor. Thch
Nhat Hanh, Keeping the Peace (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2005), describes the non-violent, dialogical
way to peace in contrast to the imperial way of war and force: When the Israelis and Palestinians have
listened to each other and communicated in Plum Village (a non-violent retreat in France), they
return to the Middle East and establish communities of practice, and invite other people to join. We
are able to make change on a small scale. But it has proven to be effective. If our governments apply
the techniques, creating an atmosphere of peace, helping people to calm down, helping them to sit
down and listen to each other, that is a much better way to remove terrorism and war than the way of
war and force. In 2004, the United States spent about four billion dollars a month in Iraq. Organizing
a retreat costs much less (p. 84).
See, e.g., Cavanagh and Mander, eds., Alternatives to Economic Globalization.
221
The growing movement for democratic constitutionalism and global

justice in Western legal and political research centres can play an important
partnership role in the growth of democratic constitutionalism in practice,
for these practical examples strive to manifest, in concrete forms, the
pluralistic and egalitarian ideal of genuinely democratic constitutionalisation that critical scholars such as Edward Said, Iris Marion Young,
Thomas Pogge, Boaventura de Sousa Santos are trying to articulate.
Such a relationship of reciprocal elucidation between de-imperialising
practices of democratic constitutionalism and critical theoretical and empirical research may help in time to make the irresolution thesis less pessimistic
than it is at the moment.64
64
In memory of Iris Marion Young, whose spectacular work and personality inspired us and kept our
spirits aloft in these dark times. It is up to us to carry on under the gentle sway of her example. The
suggestive themes in this final section are addressed more fully in Chapter 9 of this volume.
CONCLUSION
Civic freedom contra imperialism
chapter 8
A new kind of Europe? Democratic integration

in the European Union
introduction
In this and the following chapter, I turn to the question of how practitioners
of civic freedom and public philosophy can work concretely and democratically to address the political struggles we have studied in the course of the two
volumes. These are, to recall, the interrelated struggles over recognition and
distribution in Volume I and over the environment and the de-imperialisation
and democratisation of oppressive global relationships in Volume II. This
chapter addresses what can be done within the European Union and the final
chapter focuses on global and local citizen practices of freedom.
Critical reflection and debate on the forms of integration of the diverse
members of the EU have always been a part of the integration processes
since the beginning of the European Community. However, since the
global War on Terror and the explosion of conflicts over immigration,
economic policy and foreign policy, the question of integration has become
the most urgent challenge facing Europeans: the epicentre of struggles on
the ground and of critical reflection and rival solutions in the popular
media, policy communities and academic research. In response to this
complex and unpredictable terrain of integration conflicts and disintegration trends, I would like to propose for consideration a new answer to the
question of integration; an answer appropriate to todays problems. This is
not a specific answer in the sense of a set of policy recommendations, but,
rather, a general form of orientation to the conflicts over integration for
citizens, policy makers and academic researchers.1
I would like to thank Oliver Schmidtke, President of the European Community Studies Association
Canada, for inviting me to give this lecture to the 2006 Biennial Conference, What Kind of Europe?
Multiculturalism, Migration, Political Community and Lessons from Canada, University of Victoria,
BC (1920 May 2006) (www.ecsac2006.com). I would also like to thank the audience for the lively
discussion, and Richard Bellamy, Quentin Skinner and Antje Wiener for their helpful comments.
1
With the appropriate adjustments, I think this approach is applicable to other constitutional democracies as well.
225
226
Conclusion: civic freedom contra imperialism
The form of orientation to the problems of integration of the diverse

members of the EU that is both practically effective and normatively
legitimate is a specific kind of democratic integration. By diverse members
I mean the culturally diverse citizens and minorities (multiculturalism), the
twenty-five member states with their diverse national cultures (multinationalism), and the diverse civilisations of individuals, minorities and
majorities (multicivilisationalism). Integration refers to three main areas
of EU integration: cultural, economic and foreign policy. The specific kind
of democratic integration that I propose is not predominant today in either
policy or theory. However, my argument is not that this alternative form of
democratic integration is possible, in the abstract sense that another world is
possible. Rather, I wish to suggest that this democratic orientation to
integration is actual but overlooked, and, as a result, overridden. It is a way
of integration that actually takes place in practice in the everyday activities
of Europeans, but which the prevailing policy communities and theoretical
schools overlook. These evolving everyday practices of integration are overlooked perhaps because they are so commonplace that they go without
saying, but also because even policy makers and researchers who try to see
them tend to predicate the prevailing forms of representation on them, and
thus misrepresent and overlook them, thereby exacerbating the very problems they seek to address. If this invisible form of democratic integration
was rendered visible and given more prominence in the official institutions
of integration, the EU would be a new and different form of association.
It would be an association resting on the democratic practices of integration
of its diverse members and thus always open to new voices, responsive and
creative experimentation, and renewal as a shared way of life a living
democracy.2
1 three approaches to integration
The general definition of democratic integration is that the individual and
collective members who are integrated into the EU must have an effective
democratic say over the norms of integration to which they are subject. The
2
The general orientation of turning critically to the everyday in order to begin anew, against the
tendency to project an abstract form of representation over everyday activities, often in the form of
ineluctable processes, procedures and rules of modernisation, is of course an orientation of a wide
range of scholars, such as Hannah Arendt, Talal Asad, Veit Bader, Pierre Bourdieu, Stanley Cavell,
Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour and Ludwig Wittgenstein (whom I paraphrase in this paragraph). For
recent work in this tradition, see Nikolas Kompridis, ed., Philosophical Romanticism (London:
Routledge, 2006).
Democratising the European Union
227
norms of integration must be open to the democratic negotiation of those

who are subject to them. Those who are subject to them must be free to
enter into these negotiations, in the sense of actually being able and
encouraged to participate, either directly or indirectly through trusted
representatives who are held accountable in turn to those they claim to
represent by practices of democratic negotiation. We can say that the
legitimacy and effectiveness of norms of integration rest on their grounding
in two on-going types of discursive practices: of interpreting and following
the norms differently in practice without challenging the norms directly;
and of questioning, challenging, agreeing and disagreeing, negotiating
modifications or reaffirming the existing norms, implementing and experimenting with a modified regime of integration norms, acting in accordance
with it and testing it in turn. This is the traditional meaning of democracy
rule by and of the people and the traditional meaning of democratic
citizenship or democratic freedom that citizens have a participatory say
over the laws to which they are subject as applied to rules of integration.
Although this general definition of democracy is widely shared, there are
three very different approaches to integration that claim to follow from it.
The first approach is democratic in the most attenuated of senses and
should be called anti-democratic. This is the approach that bypasses the
democratic condition and imposes integration regimes on immigrants and
other diverse members without their say, on the grounds that technical
elites know best about culture, economics and foreign policy, that complex
modern systems integrate members behind their backs, that the situation is
too volatile and dissonant for democratic procedures, that immigrants are
subjects but not yet citizens so they do not have a say, that the demos comes
after integration, and so on. I think most Europeans would agree that this
anti-democratic approach is both illegitimate (democratic deficit) and
ineffective (it fails to cultivate attachment to norms through participation
and elicits disintegrative responses over its imposed integration policies).
Yet this is the paramount form of integration today. Moreover, the propaganda around terrorism, security, and the clash of civilisations strengthens
this anti-democratic approach and the reactions its policies cause are then
used to justify its extension.3 According to the European Monitoring Centre
on Racism and Xenophobia, the prevailing forms of integration increase
discrimination and segregation. And in this atmosphere of ignorance and
fear, the interior ministers of the six largest member states (France, Italy,
3
Fred Halliday, Terrorism and Delusion, OpenDemocracy (12 April 2006), available at: www.
opendemocracy.net [Accessed 30 October 2006].
228
Germany, Poland, Spain and Britain) meet privately to devise even more
offensive citizenship tests, integration contracts and other policies of coercive assimilation. This approach is clearly part of the problem rather than a
solution.4
The second and third approaches both claim to be opposed to the antidemocratic approach and to embody the democratic ideal. Yet they are very
different. I will call the second a low-intensity or restricted democratic
approach and the third an open-ended or non-restricted democratic
approach. The open-ended approach is the one that is overlooked and
which I recommend. I think that the central question today in Europe
and elsewhere is which of these three orientations to integration is to prevail
in the twenty-first century?5
The major differences between the restricted and non-restricted approaches
can be seen clearly by comparing them across four aspects of democratic
negotiation of integration regimes.
The restricted approach is restricted in that it places limits on all four
aspects of democratic negotiation:
1. The democratic negotiation of norms of integration takes place only in
what we might call the official institutions of the public sphere.
Furthermore, official representatives of the people subject to the norm
in question usually partake in the negotiations.
2. Democratic negotiation takes place within a set of pre-established procedures, and having a say within them usually consists in saying YES or
NO to a proposed norm developed elsewhere (as, for example, in the vote
on the constitution).
3. The general outline of what a norm of integration must look like at the end
of the negotiations is given at the beginning. It is usually given as beyond
question by some grand narrative of global processes of modernisation,
good governance, democratisation, human rights or civilisation.
4. The discursive practices of norm negotiation are seen as a discrete step in
a larger process of norm generation that comes to an end. Democratic
4
5
Mats Engstrm, The Fear Haunting Europe, OpenDemocracy (26 May 2006), available at: www.
The distinction between low-intensity democracy and a more open-ended and participatory democracy emerged in the early 1990s in area studies of the non-European world. In the early years of this
century, it began to be applied to the study of the restricted and elite character of representative
democracies in Europe and North America and to the narrow definition of democracy in policies of
global democratisation in international law. See, respectively, Gills, Rocamora and Wilson, Low
Intensity Democracy; Santos, The World Social Forum: A Users Manual, pp. 10415; Marks, The
Riddle of All Constitutions.
229
negotiation is one phase in the development of acceptable and final

norms of integration.
The open-ended or non-restricted orientation to democratic integration
opposes this restricted model on all four limits that it places on democratic
negotiation:
1. The democratic negotiation of norms of integration takes place not only in
the official forums of the traditional public sphere, but also wherever
individuals, groups, nations or civilisations in the EU come up against a
norm of integration they find unjust and a site of disputation emerges.
What makes a norm of integration democratic on this view is precisely
that those subject to it have the right to call it into question here and now,
to present reasons for interpreting it in different ways, or, if necessary, for
changing it; and to enter into democratic negotiations over being able to
act differently under it or, if this is not possible, to negotiate its amendment or transformation. Moreover, it is not only the official representatives
of constituencies who have a right to enter into the multiplicity of public
spheres, but, in principle, every member represented by an official spokesperson who is affected by the norm in question. The democratic principle
of audi alteram partem always listen to the other side is applied all the
way down so that everyone who speaks for another is held accountable.
2. Since the procedures of negotiation are themselves just another set
of norms of integration, they cannot be set beforehand and placed
beyond question by some dubious argument or another about their
meta-democratic status. They too must be open to different interpretations, to question and modification by those subject to them in the
course of the negotiations. This is often the main dispute. It is also not
sufficient that those subject to a norm be constrained simply to take a
YES/NO position on a proposed norm that has been drafted elsewhere
and handed down from on high. The formulation of the norm and the
interpretation of its various meanings and ways of acting in accord with
it must pass through democratic negotiations of the culturally diverse
subjects who are subject to it.
3. The general form that the norm of integration must take cannot be
imposed beforehand by an appeal to allegedly universal, necessary, or
self-evident processes of modernisation, democratisation, juridicalisation
or Europeanisation, for, in many cases, it is precisely these framing
discourses that are being called into the space of questions and challenged
in the deeply diverse Europe of today. There are alternative ways of living
modernity and a multiplicity of cultures and civilisations of Europe
today that need to be acknowledged and accommodated if Europe is to
230
be democratically and effectively integrated. We know from recent experience that attempts to integrate undemocratically, through the imposition
of partial, assimilative and inflexible integrative regimes, only lead to the
worst kinds of reaction on both sides.
4. Finally, the dialogues or, rather, multilogues of negotiating the terms
of integration are not some discrete step towards a final end-point. They
are on-going, open-ended and non-final constituents of a democratic
way of life.
On the open-ended view, a multicultural, multinational and multicivilisational association is not held together by some definitive set of public
institutions of discussion, procedures of negotiation, shared narratives, or
final norms of integration on which all must agree and that set the limits to
democratic negotiation. While the restricted approach allows for inclusion
in democratic negotiations over norms of integration, in contrast to the
anti-democratic exclusionary approach, it places four assimilative limits on
democratic negotiation precisely where disagreement is most likely to irrupt
in diverse societies, and thus displaces rather than faces the urgent conflicts
over integration today. Rather, the answer is found in the contrasting and
quotidian democratic attitude that none of these four features is ever
beyond question or the subject of unconditional agreement. What holds
the diverse members together and generates bonds of belonging to the
community as a whole across continuing differences and disagreements is
that the prevailing institutions, procedures and norms of integration are
always open to free and democratic negotiation and experimentation with
alternatives by those subject to them.
Finally, the term democratic negotiation comprises two distinct forms
of negotiation involved in integration. The first involves the activities of
challenging a prevailing norm of recognition and integration, calling it into
question, entering into negotiations and, if successful, modifying the prevailing norm, and implementing and experimenting with the modified
norm. This form of democratic negotiation, at least in its more public
and official instances, has received the lions share of attention by researchers of deliberative and agonistic democracy.
The second form of democratic negotiation occurs where diverse members share the same norm of integration yet act differently in accord with it.
They interpret and practise norm-following in a variety of different ways,
yet all can be seen, from their diverse cultural, national, civilisational or
creative perspectives, to be acting in accord with the norms of integration
they share with others. We might call this diversity of practices within a field
of shared rules diversity of ethical substance or democratic ethos. This
231
distinct form of diverse integration under shared norms has received less
attention and it is often overlooked altogether. The vast landscape of the
diversity of human practices within the shared rules of any complex association is overlooked because of the dominant yet nevertheless false view
that norms are applied and followed in only one right way: that is, a rule
determines rule-following behaviour. On this false view of rule-following
(rules as rails), if members want to change anything or act differently they
have to change the rules of the game, and so theory, research, policy and
political practice tend to focus exclusively on the rules and procedures,
thereby disregarding diverse practices of rule-following.6 Yet, as Antje
Wiener shows in her empirical and theoretical study, aptly entitled The
Invisible Constitution of Politics, diverse members of the EU negotiate the
shared rules and procedures (the visible constitution) through their culturally, nationally and improvisationally different practices of rule-following on
a day-to-day basis (the invisible constitution).7
I will now survey three overlapping and interrelated areas of integration
(culture, economics and foreign policy) to see which of the two democratic
integration approaches presents a more effective and democratic alternative
to the anti-democratic approach, and which establishes a non-coercive
relationship of reciprocal elucidation between policy communities and
makers on one side, and the overlooked everyday integration practices of
the people on the other. These two questions are closely related, for it is my
thesis that official integration will be effective and legitimate only if it is
internally related to and shaped by popular practices of integration, rather
than running roughshod over them. This is to say that there is not a no
demos problem in the EU. There are multiple demoi but they tend to be
overlooked and so either excluded from official integration processes or
included in them and subordinated to elite-driven and assimilative
procedures.8
2 cultural integration
Cultural integration comprises the culturally diverse citizens and minorities
(multiculturalism), the member states with their diverse national cultures
(multinationalism), and the diverse civilisations of individuals, minorities
and majorities (multicivilisationalism). The prevailing policies of integration tend to be based on the anti-democratic and restricted orientations.
6
8
See Volume I, Chapter 2. 7 Wiener, The Invisible Constitution of Politics.

For the background to this section see Volume I, Chapter 9.
232
The integration of immigrants, cultural, linguistic and religious minorities,

Indigenous peoples (Sami), sub-state nations and non-territorial nations
(Roma), the national traditions of member states, and different civilisations
tends to follow two general approaches:
1. Either integration consists in assimilation to a set of norms of membership that is said either to transcend cultural, national and civilisational
differences or to encode essential Western values, and thus democratic
negotiation consists solely in ratifying this transcendent or essential set;
2. Or, there is said to be scope for the expression of cultural and minority
nation differences, but this is usually limited to regimes of minority
rights and exceptions to the rule of various kinds that are more or less
given beforehand and, again, require democratic negotiation primarily
for purposes of ratification or minor modification.
The global protests over the caricatures on the subject of Islam, Muslims
and the Prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten
(30 September 2005) have tended to polarise and narrow the debate over
norms of integration even further. The choice comes down to one between
a highly assimilative (and often offensive) set of norms of membership, not
uncommonly couched in the nineteenth-century imperial terminology of
civilisation, as in the debate over Turkey, or a minimal and non-negotiable
regime of minority rights, as if this represents a generous defence of the
aspirations of multiculturalism and multinationalism.9
As the democratic theorists and social scientists of struggles over recognition have shown, these options bypass or co-opt the active engagement of
the members affected in the processes of working up the conditions of
integration, of debating them and of negotiating modifications of them over
time. But, it is precisely these democratic activities that create a sense of
attachment to the larger community even when members do not get all
their demands. Conversely, it is exclusion from or subalternisation within
these discursive practices that ratchets up ignorance of the other, xenophobia, extreme positions and the predictable outpouring of ressentiment.10
9
10
Faisal Devji, Back to the Future: The Cartoons, Liberalism and Global Islam, OpenDemocracy
(13 April 2006), available at: www.opendemocracy.net [Accessed 30 October 2006]; Fred Halliday,
Turkey and the Hypocrisies of Europe, OpenDemocracy (16 December 2004), available at: www.
Breda, A European Constitution; Tierney, Constitutional Law and National Pluralism; Veit Bader,
Against Monism: Pluralist Critical Comments on Danielle Allen and Philip Pettit, in Political
Exclusion and Domination, eds. Melissa Williams and Stephen Macedo (New York: New York
University Press, 2005); Nikolas Kompridis, Normativing Hybridity/Neutralizing Culture,
Political Theory 33(3), 2005: 31843; Nikolas Kompridis, The Unsettled and Unsettling Claims of
Culture: A Reply to Seyla Benhabib, Political Theory 34(3), 2006: 38996.
233
For example, Vito Breda applies an open-ended approach to EU constitutionalisation and suggests that the NO votes in France and the
Netherlands can be explained in part in these terms:
The European Convention, which prepared for drafting the Treaty Establishing a
Constitution for Europe, aimed to rationalize the existing system of treaties and to
set a blueprint for a new model of European Governance. Because of its institu
tional structure and mission, the Convention was not a suitable democratic arena
for a process of recognition of national identities and their claims, which were
depicted as an obstacle in the process of European integration.11
In another exemplary context of failed integration, the riots of Muslim

youth in the poor neighbourhoods of French cities in 2005 (which continue
today) may also be based in part on not having any democratic forum in
which to express their grievances and influence policy.
The tragedy is that we do not even know why peoples voted NO in one
case and rioted in the other because discursive practices of having a say were
not part of either. There has been much speculation about the reasons and
aspirations of those involved in both cases, but the open-ended approach,
which would have provided the answer, was not tried. It is difficult to
see, for example, how the well-documented racism, discrimination and
economic inequality suffered by Muslim youth can be addressed unless
the people who are subject to it have an effective say from the bottom up. As
Breda points out, most of the member states already have the legal and
political means to establish discursive practices of democratic negotiation
for various forms of cultural integration.12
Nevertheless, despite all the deep difficulties of cultural integration, in
everyday life Europe is one of the most convivial intercultural, international
and intercivilisational associations on the planet. The diverse members
negotiate their interactions on an everyday basis (in both senses of negotiation). A new kind of diversity-savvy solidarity across cultural differences
is emerging out of these interactions that Paul Gilroy calls conviviality, that
is, the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britains urban areas and in postcolonial cities everywhere.13 These practical arts of peaceful interaction and
dispute resolution among diverse partners are learned and practised in the
daily activities of work, school and play, in not-for-profit organisations, in
immigrant and refugee organisations, and so on. As Gilroy, Breda, and
Weiner show in different ways, they exist throughout the EU. The ethical
11
13
Breda, A European Constitution, pp. 3412. 12 Ibid., p. 340.

Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004), p. xi.
234
arts of grass-roots conviviality in working against racism, discrimination and

inequality fall beneath the threshold of most social-scientific research,
policy making and theory, for, as we have seen, they tend to focus on the
explicit norms rather than the implicit diversity of democratic ethos within
them. Yet, for all that, these ordinary practical abilities and informal arts are
the ground of an alternative and democratic integration.
Finally, cultural integration cannot be addressed in isolation from the
other two fields of integration in the following sections (economic and
foreign policy). A promising example of a democratic approach that tries to
take into account all three fields is the Alliance of Civilizations. It was set up
in 2005 by the leaders of Spain and Turkey through the United Nations to
deal with civilisational integration holistically and through multilevel dialogues among Muslims and non-Muslims. Tomaz Mastnak, the Director of
the Secretariat for the Alliance of Civilizations, explains that Muslims will
not be successfully integrated into Western societies until civilisational
inequalities are addressed and the continuing imperialism of the foreign
policy of Western powers in Muslim countries is abolished. For starters this
means the end of war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the resolution of the
IsraelPalestine conflict.14
3 economic integration
If we turn to economic integration, which is probably the primary field of
integration, affecting the other two in complex ways, we see an analogous
situation. The paramount form of economic integration today is the neoliberal model. Of course there is considerable dissatisfaction with this.
However, when the question is asked what is the nature of this dissatisfaction with neo-liberal economic integration?, the leading answer is not
to bring the dissatisfied into the official discussions. Rather, the pre-emptory
answer is that the dissatisfaction is the expression of support for a rather
familiar alternative, namely, a social-democratic economic model with a
traditional public sphere for the European demos.15 And, when this
14
15
Tomaz Mastnak, Working Paper for the High Level Group (unpublished paper prepared for the
Alliance of Civilizations Meeting, Palma De Mallorca, 2729 November 2005); Vitaly Naumkin,
Taking the First Hard Steps to Civilization Alliance, RIA Novosti (27 February 2006), available at:
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/2006222/43712744.html [Accessed 30 October 2006]; Dalia Al-Hadidi,
Alliance of Civilizations Urges Action not Talk, Islam Online (26 February 2006), available at:
www.islamonline.net/English/News/2006-02/26/article05.shtml [Accessed 30 October 2006];
Gregory, The Colonial Present.
For a statement of this alternative approach, see Jrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, February 15,
or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of
235
alternative model is advanced by the counter-elites of the core countries of

the Union, it further divides rather than integrates. Many of the economic
and policy elites in the core countries are clearly more comfortable with the
neo-liberal (or Anglo-American) model and do not wish to threaten their
economic relationship with the United States by confronting it with an
alternative economic model and entering into a rivalry. And the United
Kingdom and many of the non-core or new Europe countries refuse to
take the role assigned to them by the core counter-elites and support the
neo-liberal model.16 As with cultural integration, the debate over these two
pre-packaged models of economic integration is accompanied by speculative
interpretation of the periodic outbreaks of popular dissatisfaction: the NO
votes on the constitution may have been an expression of dissatisfaction with
neo-liberal integration; the demonstrations of French students, union members and concerned citizens probably were; the election of social-democratic
governments in Spain and Italy may be a sign of something, and so on.
However, what tends to be bypassed or subordinated by these two
dominant models is recourse to discursive practices in which members
could have a say on the conditions of economic integration. Yet, there is
already a multiplicity of alternative forms of economic integration that exist
in practice in the civil societies of Europe within the norms of the two
contending elite models. The immensely successful European cooperative
movements, the grass-roots movements for associative democracy, voluntary simplicity, the rapidly growing network of fair trade within and
against the norms of free trade, a plethora of ecological economic networks,
ecosystem management experiments, ecological certification networks
and other alternative trade systems, food security and food sovereignty,
sustainable consumption, green consumerism, and the fledging European
16
Europe, in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, ed. Lasse Thomassen (Edinburgh: University of

Edinburgh Press, 2006), first published 31 May 2003. Although primarily concerned with
European foreign policy, it recommends building the key features of social democracy, the welfare
state and a European-wide official public sphere into the EU as a basis for a counter foreign policy to
that of the United States. The manifesto is closely associated with the project of Joschka Fischer, the
German Foreign Secretary, in May 2000, to renew the core countries of Europe. For the divisive
effects of this alternative integration model and the rapid decline in support for it, see Deppe,
Habermas Manifesto for a European Renaissance. For the foreign policy side of the proposal, see
the following section, as well as Habermas, The Kantian Project, and Walker, Making a World of
Difference?. For a defence of the classic assimilation model of European social-democratic integration, including the claim that it is valid for the human race, and the dismissal of the kind of openended and multicultural democratic approach I propose, see Fraser and Honneth, Recognition or
Redistribution, pp. 11097, 23768. For a critical introduction to this debate, see Simon Thompson, Is
Redistribution a Form of Recognition? Comments on the FraserHonneth Debate, Critical Review of
International Social and Political Philosophy 8(1), 2005: 85102.
Deppe, Habermas Manifesto for a European Renaissance.
236
Social Forum are all examples of alternative economic organisations within

Europe and internationally that do not conform to the two elite models
but, rather, manifest actual alternatives.
There is a growing body of academic research on these populist alternative economic networks across Europe and globally. In addition, the EU
and its member states are probably the world leaders in beginning to
establish relations between them and policy communities, especially in
areas such as the environment, the Kyoto Accord and sustainable consumption. However, the nurturing of democratic relationships of reciprocal
elucidation, in which people involved in alternative economic practices
have an open and effective say in official economic policy discussions
without being constrained to speak within the limits of neo-liberal or
Keynesian economics, is still a novelty and faces all the well-known
obstacles that entrenched interests can place in its way. Yet, if there is to
be an orientation to economic integration in Europe that does not destroy
the environment, deepen inequalities both within Europe and globally,
remain alienated from the people who are subject to its effects, and so lead
to deeper divisions and disintegration, then there is no alternative to a more
open-ended democratic approach.17
4 foreign policy integration
The integration of the EU and its partners into a new foreign policy regime
is one of the most discussed and contentious issues today. On the one hand,
a number of member states support the coalition headed by the United
States and the United Kingdom, their global War on Terror and their
continuing wars against and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Even
those who have disagreed with the United States over the war in Iraq have
not deviated that far from US foreign policy in other respects. Moreover,
Europe has followed the United States in the implementation of massive
regimes of securitisation and surveillance since 9/11. On the other hand,
millions of European citizens have protested against the coalition and
especially the war in Iraq. The anti-war demonstrations are the largest protests
in the history of the European Community. Yet, when one asks what the
protesters might propose as an alternative, the dominant response is not the
democratic one of actually asking the protesters. Rather, a ready-made
17
For a critical survey of the literature on alternative economic and environmental futures, I am
indebted to Noah Quastel, Contract, Sustainability and the Ecology of Exchange (LLM dissertation,
Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, 2006).
237
alternative foreign policy is given as the answer, and it is often presented as the
answer that the protesters themselves would give. Thus, as in the case of
economic integration, the discussion in the official public sphere is dominated by two hegemonic models of foreign policy integration, coupled with a
corresponding disregard of a more dialogical and democratic approach
grounded in a wider and more open array of public spheres.
The main features of this alternative foreign policy under which the
EU should be integrated are usually the following. It is presented as a
point-by-point alternative and counter-weight to the imperial foreign
policy of the United States. It would be multilateral rather than unilateral;
work through the UN and international law rather than bypassing or
undermining them; and aim to constitutionalise the existing Charter of
the United Nations as the constitution of the international society. It would
also promote the building of other continental, transnational, constitutional
regimes on the model of the EU throughout the world, advance a more
social-democratic alternative to global neo-liberalism through the WB, IMF
and WTO, and support humanitarian intervention and international individual human rights. Versions of this elite alternative have been advanced by
Jrgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck, among several others.18 Peter Swan
describes it with approval as a counter-empire to US imperialism and finds
the prototype of it in a proposal by Carl Schmitt in 1955 and especially a plan
for a new European empire presented by Alexandre Kojve to the French
government in 1945.19
It is difficult to see how this alternative foreign policy would be any more
integrative and less contentious than joining the United States coalition. Its
formulation has not passed through any kind of open democratic negotiation of the people of Europe, let alone of the non-European peoples who
are supposed to welcome it with open arms, and nothing more than a lowintensity form of restricted democratic negotiation, with all four limits in
place, appears to be envisioned. The central difference from current US
imperial foreign policy is that the EU and other great powers (the G8)
would work together rather than unilaterally and through transnational and
international law rather than outside the law. But, the present Charter of the
United Nations is hierarchical and exclusionary; many features of international law have been criticised by the former colonies since decolonisation as
18
19
Habermas and Derrida, February 15; Habermas, The Kantian Project; Ulrich Beck, American
Empire, Cosmopolitan Europe, Europe Review (Spring 2003), available at: www.times-publications.
com/publications/ERSpring03/ER 29.htm [Accessed 30 October 2006]; Ulrich Beck, The Truth of
Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach, Common Knowledge 10(3), 2004: 43049.
Swan, American Empire or Empires?.
238
continuing Western imperialism by juridical means; the Bretton Woods

institutions are seen by millions of protesters as establishing an informal
type of post-colonial imperial governance; and none of these institutions has
ever been subject to the democratic negotiation of the billions of people
who are subject to their laws and policies.
The European global juridicalisation of the massively unequal institutions of the present international order and remaking the major regions in
the image of the EU would be no less imperial and anti-democratic than the
foreign policy it is designed to challenge. It is not very different from the
liberal imperialism of the last two centuries.20 Neil Walkers conclusion to
his judicious critique of this alternative is that there is one final and perhaps
fatal objection. The project rests on a grand narrative of a particular set of
teleological processes of modernisation and juridicalisation that are presented as universal but that are deeply embedded in historical phases of
Western domination. The very peoples who have been historically disempowered and disadvantaged by these processes are then asked to trust in
their eventual democratisation-to-come when they have no reason to do so
and every historical reason to dissent.21
The hegemonic debate between the two elite models of foreign policy
integration in their various iterations either disregards the open-ended
democratic alternative altogether or, if it is noticed, treats it as beyond the
pale of public reason, since the limits of public reason are defined by the
four types of restriction these two models uphold. As a result, the openended alternative is construed as some form of unreasonable radical
democracy, whereas, once the hegemonic orientation is seen as simply
one limited orientation among others in a broader field of creative arts of
public reasoning, the open-ended approach appears as a reasonable and
indeed practicable alternative.22 As in the cases of cultural and economic
integration, the open-ended approach recommends a wider and deeper
discussion of a possible European foreign policy. This would bring to
light what the official debate overlooks: there are already a multiplicity of
localglobal relationships between Europeans and non-Europeans that do
not conform to either of the elite models but that exist in practice among
distant neighbours in the global village. Millions of ordinary, concerned
20
21
22
Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations; Anghie, Imperialism; Simpson, Great Powers and
Outlaw States; Deppe, Habermas Manifesto for a European Renaissance.
Walker, Making a World of Difference?. This chapter by Walker is a response to Habermas, The
Kantian Project, which is a concise statement of Habermas, Der gespaltene Westen. In this section,
I draw on Chapters 5 and 7, this volume.
Toulmin, Return to Reason; Tully, Volume I, Chapter 9.
239
Europeans are deeply involved in networks of the international peace and

non-violence movements, alternative dispute-resolution initiatives, support
networks for local forms of democratic empowerment rather than the
imposition of structural adjustment, Western law and low-intensity democracy, fair trade rather than free trade, mutual aid rather than a race to the
bottom, the World Social Forum and so on.23
The distinctive feature of these localglobal alternative foreign policy
networks is that they are democratic and anti-imperial. They are based on
dialogical relationships that are worked up and continuously negotiated
democratically by European and non-European partners over generations.
They thus exemplify in concrete practice, in actuality, the basis of an openended democratic foreign policy for the EU; one that would pass through
the democratic negotiation not only of Europeans but also of nonEuropeans who would be both subject to and co-authors of it. The foreign
relations that Europe would establish with others would not be pre-structured
around one Western model of modernity and cosmopolitan order, but
through dialogues of many existing civilisations, alternative modernities
and cosmopolites.24 These pacific foreign relationships are not based on the
fear-based presumption that the other exists in a lawless state of nature and
is ill-disposed towards us, and so on the imposition of Western law and
order before a civilised dialogue can begin, as in the case of the two
dominant Western models (with their roots in Hobbes and Kants articulation of this structure of argument). They are based on the opposite, trustengendering presumption of disarming openness to diversely cultured
others and the primacy of critical dialogue. In most of the great religions,
ethical traditions and peacemaking practices of the world, this Gandhian
path has always been seen as the real means to peace on earth.25 One can
hope that initiatives like the Alliance of Civilizations and the World Social
Forum are means of bringing these actual alternative practices of democratic
and peaceful foreign relationships into critical dialogue with the two dominant approaches to foreign policy integration.26 For, as Nietzsche argued
perceptively in response to the crisis of European historical and political
23
24
25
26
Seabrook, The No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty; Graham Dunkley, Free Trade: Myth, Reality and
Alternatives (London: Zed Books, 2003); Hans von Sponek, The Conduct of the UN Before and
After the 2003 Invasion, in Empires Law: The American Imperial Project and the War to Remake the
World, ed. Amy Bartholomew (London: Pluto Press, 2006).
Latour, Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?.
Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-Violent Conflict (New
York: St Martins Press, 2000).
Mastnak, Working Paper for the High Level Group; Santos, The World Social Forum: A Users
Manual.
240
culture in the 1870s and as the critics of the same ruling ideology of
democratic peace argue today, the last thing the two dominant approaches
will ever bring is peace.27
conclusion: linking communities
I have proposed a more democratic and open-ended approach to cultural,
economic and foreign policy integration in the EU. I have also suggested
that this approach already exists to some extent in the daily practices of
democratic negotiation and conviviality among millions of Europeans and
non-Europeans within the field of the dominant norms of integration.
These practical arts of democratic integration are often overlooked, but
they could be an actual source of legitimate and effective integration if they
were given prominence in the official policies of integration.
The central problem is one of overlooking and overriding these sources of
democratic integration. James Scott diagnoses this type of problem as
seeing like a state: overlooking the multiplicity of existing practical arts
of interaction and integration of diverse citizens, involving non-theoretical
embodied savoir-faire, by seeing them as an unorganised field that needs to
be organised in accordance with a master plan of abstract rules and procedures.28 This type of seeing is not restricted to states and large entities like
the EU. It also informs seeing like a corporation, where the activities of
citizens are seen as inchoate patterns of production and consumption open
to organisation under a system of contract and commodification rules.29
Unfortunately, the main tendency of the EU at present seems to be a
combination of these abstract rationalities legal juridification, governmental planification and corporate commodification across all three areas
of integration.
If this diagnosis is correct, then the task for researchers is, firstly, to study
the practices of cultural, economic and foreign policy integration that exist
beneath the paramount way of looking at and organising citizen activities,
and, secondly, to link these practices to official policies of integration by
means of democratic negotiation forums, in which citizens, policy makers
and researchers can work together and learn from each other without the
27
28
29
Nietzsche, The Means to Real Peace; Christian J. Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of
History: Historical Thought and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008); Alvarez, Do Liberal States Behave Better?; Lawrence, Peace
of Imperial Method?.
Scott, Seeing Like a State.
Quastel, Contract, Sustainability and the Ecology of Exchange.
241
subordination inherent in the restricted model. The traditional forum for

linking citizen practices with policy makers has been the political party, but,
as Peter Mair argues, political parties are failing at this task, not only in the
European Parliament, but more generally.30 One explanation for this might
be the thesis advanced by Manuel Castells. He argues that over the last
thirty years societies and their institutions have undergone a transformation
in their form of organisation that he calls networkisation. The dominant
social morphology of almost all organisations now, from multinational
firms, militaryindustrial complexes, EU and global governance to the smallest volunteer organisation is the network form.31 If this is correct, then one
of the reasons for the crises of political parties may be that, while citizens
grass-roots democratic practices of integration have made the transition to
networkisation, parties have not. The task then is to networkise European
political parties so they can mediate more effectively between citizens and
policy makers, but also to invent new types of democratic networks of
negotiation that are tailor-made to mediate in an open-ended democratic
way in the network age.32
I think we need to turn to the everyday practices of democratic integration for guidance here as well, for there are already creative experiments in
such mediating networks available in the practices I have referred to across
the three fields of integration. Furthermore, one of the most promising
research methods in Europe today can be used to study existing networks
from the critical perspective of open-ended democracy, namely the actornetwork approach of Bruno Latour and his colleagues, and related
approaches.33 Actor-network research shows that most of the existing networks that link citizens with policy makers are composed of unequal
relationships of hegemonic actors who set the conditions of negotiations
and subalterns who are constrained to comply.34 Notwithstanding, research
also shows that the multilayered networks of communication, power and
law are not closed structures of domination. Rather, they are, to varying
30
31
32
33
34
Peter Mair, Popular Democracy and the European Union Polity, European Governance Papers
(18 May 2005), available at: www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/projekte/typo3/site/fileadmin/wp/
abstract/C-05-03.htm [Accessed 30 October 2006].
Castells, The Rise of Network Society. See Chapter 6, this volume.
Richard Bellamy and Alex Warleigh, Introduction: The Puzzle of EU Citizenship, in Citizenship and
Governance in the European Union, eds. Richard Bellamy and Alex Warleigh (London: Continuum,
2001).
John Law and John Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); Bruno
Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005); Quastel, Contract, Sustainability and the Ecology of Exchange.
Von Bernstorff, Democratic Global Internet Regulation?
242
degrees, open to the negotiation and modification, and even occasional

transformation, of the subaltern actors who are subject to them yet also
actors in them.35 So, here again in linking everyday practices of democratic
integration with official policies at multiple levels by means of networks
there are good reasons for applying the open-ended approach and some
modest grounds for hope. These are examples of linking public philosophy
and citizen practices.
A European Union that had the courage and humility to turn to the
practical wisdom of its sovereign citizens for guidance in this critically
reflexive and experimental way would be a new and democratic Europe.
It would not be a union that brought its demos into being at the end of the
day but one that brought itself into a conversation of reciprocal elucidation
and co-articulation with the demoi who have been there since daybreak.
This, if I am not mistaken, is the democratic relation between the people
and their governors.36
35
36
Walker, The Idea of Constitutional Pluralism; Wiener, The Dual Quality of Norms; Chapters 4
and 6, this volume.
For the deep problems in conceptualising this relationship between the people and the EU, I am
indebted to Christodoulidis, Constitutional Irresolution; and to Hans Lindahl, Acquiring a
Community: The Acquis and the Institution of European Legal Order, European Law Journal 9(4),
2003: 43350; and Hans Lindahl, Constituent Power and Reflexive Identity: Towards an Ontology of
Collective Selfhood, in The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form,
eds. Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
chapter 9
On local and global citizenship: an

apprenticeship manual
introduction: global citizenship

as negotiated practices
This concluding chapter draws together the strands of argument throughout the two volumes of Public Philosophy in a New Key. It weaves these
diverse strands into a sketch of a new kind of local and global citizenship I
call glocal citizenship. This mode of citizenship has the capacity to overcome the imperialism of the present age and bring a democratic world into
being.
Global citizenship has emerged as the locus of struggles on the ground
and of reflection and contestation in theory.1 This is scarcely surprising.
Many of the central and most enduring struggles in the history of politics
have taken place in and over the language of citizenship and the activities
and institutions into which it is woven. One could say that the hopes and
dreams and fears and xenophobia of centuries of individual and collective
political actors are expressed in the overlapping and conflicting histories of
the uses of the language of citizenship, the forms of life in which they have
been employed and the locales in which they take place. This motley
ensemble of contested languages, activities and institutions constitutes the
inherited field of citizenship today.2
The language of global and globalisation and the activities, institutions
and processes to which it refers and in which it is increasingly used, while
1
For an introduction to this broad field, see McKinnon and Hampsher-Monk, eds., The Demands of
Citizenship; Nigel Dower and John Williams, eds., Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction (New
York: Routledge, 2002); Nigel Dower, An Introduction to Global Citizenship (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2003); Held and McGrew, eds., The Global Transformations Reader; Janine Brodie,
Introduction: Globalization and Citizenship Beyond the Nation State, Citizenship Studies 8(4), 2004:
32332; Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius, Mary Kaldor and Fiona Holland, eds., Global Civil Society
20042005 (London: Sage, 2005); Amoore, ed., The Global Resistance Reader.
I mean by field the field of human action, the field of academic research and the ecological field in
which these are carried on. Similarly, language of citizenship refers to the broad range of vocabularies
or discourses of citizenship practices, policies and theories.
243
244
more recent than citizenship, comprise a similarly central and contested

domain. Globalisation has become a shared yet disputed vocabulary in
terms of which rival interpretations of the ways in which humans and
their habitats are governed globally are presented and disputed in both
practice and theory. It thus constitutes a similarly contested field of
globalisation.
When globalisation and citizenship are combined, they not only bring
their contested histories of meanings with them. Their conjunction brings
into being a complex new field that raises new questions and elicits new
answers concerning the meaning of, and relationship between, global
governance and global citizenship. When we enquire into global citizenship, therefore, we are already thrown into this remarkably complex
inherited field of contested languages, activities, institutions, processes
and the environs in which they take place. This conjoint field is the
problematisation of global citizenship: the way that formerly disparate
activities, institutions, processes and languages have been gathered together
under the rubric of global citizenship, become the site of contestation in
practice and are formulated as a problem in research, policy and theory, to
which diverse solutions are presented and debated.3
The reason why the uses of citizenship, globalisation and global
citizenship are contestable, rather than fixed and determinant, is, as
Wittgenstein classically argued, that there is neither an essential set of
necessary and sufficient criteria for the correct use of such concepts nor a
calculus for their application in particular cases. The art of understanding a
concept like global citizenship is not the application of a universal rule to
particular cases. Rather, the uses of such complex concepts in different cases
and contexts do not have one set of properties in common, but from case
to case an indeterminate family of overlapping and criss-crossing similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. What we see,
therefore, is not a single rule (definition or theory) being applied in every
case, but, rather, a complicated network of similarities overlapping and
criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of
detail.4 A language user learns how to use a concept by apprenticeship in
the practice of use and discrimination in everyday life, by invoking (defeasible) similarities and dissimilarities with other cases and responding to
3
4
See Volume I, Chapters 1 and 3 for this approach.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. See Volume I, Chapter 2 for an exploration of this account of
learning and understanding language.
On local and global citizenship
245
counter-arguments when challenged, and thereby gradually acquiring the

abilities to use it in normative and critical ways in new contexts.5
Since the use of concepts with complex histories is not everywhere
circumscribed by rules, Wittgenstein continues, the extension of the
concept is not closed by a frontier.6 It is almost always possible, to some
indeterminate extent, to question a given normal use, invoke slightly different similarities with other historical uses or interpret a shared criterion
differently, argue that the term can be extended in an unexpected and
unpredictable way, which is nevertheless related to other familiar uses,
and to act on it (and sometimes the act precedes the argumentation for the
novel use).7 Use, and therefore meaning, is not the application of a transcendental or official theory of citizenship. It is an indeterminate spatialtemporal negotiated practice among partners in relations of dialogical
interlocution and practical interaction in which the possibility of going on
differently is always present.8 This pragmatic linguistic freedom of enunciation and initiation of contestability and speaking otherwise within the
weighty constraints of the inherited relations of use and meaning is, as we
shall see, internally related to a practical (extra-linguistic) freedom of enactment and improvisation within the inherited relations of power in which
the vocabulary is used.9 It is the reason why the history of citizens and
citizenship is not the unfolding of some trans-historical definition that the
grand theories claim it to be. It is not the endless repetition of the same
formula, stages of historical development towards a predictable end, an
instrument controlled by the hegemonic class, or the dialectical overcoming
of antagonistic forces. Unfortunately for theorists and fortunately for
human beings, it is precisely the unpredictable deeds and events we call
historical.10
The creation of the conjunction global citizenship could be seen as a
prime exemplar of the innovative freedom of citizens and non-citizens to
contest and initiate something new in the practice of citizenship. The
multiplicity of contests that extend citizenship into the field of globalisation
(conceived formerly as a realm of predictable historical processes impervious
5
6
8
9
10
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 75.

7
Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 68 note, and 75.
See Jos Medina, The Unity of Wittgensteins Philosophy: Necessity, Intelligibility, and Normativity
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), pp. 14194; and Medina, Language (London: Continuum, 2005),
pp. 13967.
This contextual freedom of enunciation and enactment (words and deeds) is an aspect of civic
freedom (section 4 below).
Hannah Arendt, What is Freedom?, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 169; and see Volume I, Chapter 4.
246
to civic action) could be construed as the initiatory act of global citizenship

that opens a new field of possibilities of another, more democratic, world.
While partly true, the actual existing inherited field of global citizenship is
much more complex, and the possibilities of initiating and carrying on civic
action much more contextually situated within the field, than this abstract
formulation could unintentionally lead one to believe. If we wish to become
effective global citizens, then there is no alternative to undergoing the
apprenticeship of learning our way around this complicated field and
coming to acquire the practical abilities of thinking and acting within it
and the critical abilities of seeing the concrete possibilities of going beyond
its limits. This exploration of the field is thus an apprenticeship manual in
becoming who we can be local and global citizens.
1 two modes of citizenship: preliminary sketch
Among the many contested meanings and corresponding practices of global
citizenship, I would like to focus on two and their traditions of interpretation. Many of the most important struggles around the globe today are over
these two modes of global citizenship, and the struggles themselves consist
in the enactment of them. Here a mode of citizenship refers to the
ensemble composed of a distinctive language of citizenship and its traditions
of interpretation on the one hand, and the corresponding practices and
institutions to which it refers and in which it is used on the other.11 The two
I wish to examine have been interpreted in different ways and related to
different traditions of citizenship under different names in a wide variety of
academic and activist literature: for example, global citizenship from above
versus global citizenship from below, low-intensity versus high-intensity
global citizenship, representative versus direct, hegemonic versus counterhegemonic, cosmopolitan versus place-based, universal versus multiversal.
I call these two families modern and diverse citizenship. I call modern
citizenship in a modern state civil citizenship and in a global context
cosmopolitan citizenship. The corresponding names of diverse citizenship
are civic and glocal. Glocal and glocalisation in the diverse citizenship
tradition refer to the global networking of local practices of civic citizenship in
contrast to the use of global and globalisation in modern/cosmopolitan
11
This account of modes of citizenship is adapted from Wittgensteins concept of language games and
Foucaults concept of practical systems (see Volume I, Chapters 13). In earlier chapters I have used the
general category of practices rather than modes. However, in this case, citizenship is taken as a practice
in one tradition and an institution in the other, so the use of practice as the generic term would elide
this crucial difference.
247
citizenship.12 The comparative explication of these two historical and contemporary vocabularies and the practices in which they are used aims to bring
to light the shared field of citizenship from their different orientations. I begin
with a preliminary sketch of two general aspects of citizenship as a way of
introducing them.13
The first and most familiar aspect is that modern citizenship is the
modular form of citizenship associated with the historical processes of
modernisation and colonisation: that is, (i) the modernisation of the West
into modern nation-states with representative governments, a system of
international law, the decolonisation of European empires, supranational
regime formations and the development of global civil society; and, in
tandem, (ii) the dependent modernisation and citizenisation of the nonWest through colonisation, the Mandate System, post-decolonisation
nation-building and global governance of the former colonies. The language
of modern citizenship, in its civil and cosmopolitan forms, presents successive idealisations of modern Euroamerican citizenship as the uniquely
universal module for all human societies. This allegedly universal mode
of citizenship is also presented as the product of universal historical processes or stages of development under successive discourses of progress
civilisation, modernisation, constitutionalisation, democratisation and now
globalisation that began in Europe and have been spread around the world
by Euroamerican expansion and continuing hegemony. These two features
of modern citizenship a universal institutional form of citizenship
conjoined with a universal set of historical processes that bring it to the
non-West under Western tutelage are articulated and debated in, respectively, modern normative theories of citizenship and social scientific theories of modernisation from the eighteenth century to today.
In contrast, diverse citizenship is associated with a diversity or multiplicity of different practices of citizenship in the West and non-West. The
language of diverse citizenship, both civic and glocal, presents citizenship as
a situated or local practice that takes countless forms in different locales.
It is not described in terms of universal institutions and historical processes,
but in terms of grass-roots democratic or civic activities of the governed
(the people) in the specific relationships of governance in specific locales
and the glocal activities of networking with other local practices. Whereas
12
13
I am indebted to Warren Magnusson for introducing me to the concept of and literature on glocal
citizenship.
This preliminary sketch is developed in more detail in the following sections on the basis of the
themes of these two volumes.
248
modern citizenship focuses on citizenship as a universalisable legal status

underpinned by institutions and processes of rationalisation that enable and
circumscribe the possibility of civil activity (an institutional/universal
orientation), diverse citizenship focuses on the singular civic activities and
improvisations of the governed in any practice of government and the
diverse ways these are more or less institutionalised or blocked in different
contexts (a civic activity/contextual orientation). Citizenship is not a status
given by the institutions of the modern constitutional state and international law, but negotiated practices in which one becomes a citizen through
participation.
The second aspect of the language of modern citizenship, especially the
theories, histories and comparative taxonomies, not only elaborates a theory
of modern citizenship with its membership codes, rights and duties, and
corresponding institutional preconditions. It also characterises all other
practices of citizenship in relation to its unique form as the universal
standard. Other modes of citizenship are classified either as not really
citizenship at all (not meeting any of the modern criteria) or, if some modern
criteria are present, as primitive, pre-modern, traditional or customary stages
of proto-citizenship on the historical path (cultural, economic, cognitive,
political) to full modern citizenship as the telos, and as requiring some form
of direct or indirect guidance from the self-described, more advanced,
civilised or developed races, nations or peoples. That is, the kind of critical
theory that has accompanied modern citizenship since the eighteenth
century critically organises all other forms of citizenship in the world as
lower or inferior in relationship to its form as the regulative ideal. This
feature of the language of modern citizenship is called the subalternisation
or colonisation of other forms of citizenship: bringing them to language
under a description of their subalternity or coloniality relative to modern
citizenship.14
The language of diverse citizenship, in contrast, characterises other forms
of citizenship as singular and historically contingent and critically compares
them in terms of various similar and dissimilar aspects and from the
perspectives and normative criteria of each.15 From these perspectival and
critical comparisons, modern citizenship (like all forms of citizenship) is
seen as one singular, historical form of citizenship among others, with its
14
15
Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border
Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
That is, the diverse tradition studies citizenship in the comparative and analogical way that
Wittgenstein outlines in the introductory section. For these two contrasting genres of reasoning,
the modern and the diverse, see Volume I, Chapter 1.
249
strengths and weaknesses relative to others, yet presenting itself in false

(circular) claims to universality (formulated in different ways over the last
two hundred years) that legitimate its global imposition. That is, the kind of
critical attitude that accompanies practices of diverse citizenship contextualises or provincialises modern citizenship and its universalising language,
usually but not necessarily by a historical or genealogical contextualisation.16 The aim of this critical attitude is to free us from the hold of the
globally dominant language of modern citizenship as the pre-emptive
language of disclosure of all forms of citizenship and enable us to see it as
one language among others. In so doing, it de-universalises modern citizenship (for, as we have seen, its claim to universality is internal to the globally
dominant language of modern citizenship) and de-subalternises other
modes of citizenship (discloses them in their local languages and histories).
Modern citizenship can thus be put in its place as one singular (and
imperious) mode in a global field of diverse alternatives and the critical
work of comparisons and contrasts from different perspectives and norms of
assessment can begin. This difficult practice of situated critical freedom is
not a change in theory but in attitude or ethos in the way one sees and acts
on the possibilities available in the world of citizenship.17
MODERN CITIZENSHIP
2 modern civil citizenship

The tradition of modern citizenship takes as its empirical and normative
exemplar the form of citizenship characteristic of the modern nation-state.18
Citizenship (both civil and cosmopolitan) is defined in relation to two clusters
of institutional features of modern nation-states: the constitutional rule of law
(nomos) and representative government (demos). The constitutional rule of
16
17
18
See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in
the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
For the contrast between a critical theory and a critical attitude, see Volume I, Chapter 3.
For the background to section 2 see Tully, Strange Multiplicity, as well as Volume I, Chapter 6, and
Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 7, this volume, and the references at note 1 above. See also Ellen Meiksins Wood,
Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995); Quentin Skinner and Bo Strth, eds., States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Sandra Halperin, War and Social Change in Modern
Europe: The Great Transformation Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Micheline
R. Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004); John Dunn, Democracy: A History (Toronto: Penguin Canada,
2005); Held, Models of Democracy; and Charles Tilly, Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
250
law is the first condition of citizenship. The civil law (a formal legal order)
and its enforcement by a coercive authority establishes (literally constitutes) the conditions of civilisation, the city (civitas), citizenship, civil
society, civil liberty and civility (hence civil citizenship). By definition
the outside is the realm of the uncivilised: barbarism, savagery, the state of
nature or war, or the uncertainty of informal, customary law and unenforceable natural law. A person has the status of citizenship in virtue of being
subject to civil law in two senses: to an established and enforced system of
law and to the civilising, pacifying or socialising force of the rule of law on
the subjectivity (self-awareness and self-formation) of those who are constrained to obey over time. This is why cosmopolitan citizenship and global
civil society depend on some form of legalisation or constitutionalisation of
the global order analogous (in various ways) to the modern nation-state.
Relative to the constitutional rule of law, modern citizenship is defined as
a status (state or condition). This civil status is usually explicated and
defined in terms of the historical development of four rights (liberties)
and duties of formally equal individual subjects of an association of constitutional rule of law and representative government. The association can
be either the modern nation-state, including its subordinate provinces and
cities, or its analogous associations for cosmopolitan citizenship (international law, the United Nations, global governance institutions). I will start
with the four tiers of citizenship rights and duties within modern nationstates as they are the basis of modern/cosmopolitan global citizenship.
(1) Civil liberties. The first and indispensable tier of rights is the set of civil
liberties (the liberties of the moderns or private autonomy) of the modern
liberal tradition. This set includes the liberty of the person and of speech,
thought and faith, the right to own private property and enter into contracts,
and the right to formal equality before the law. Citizens are at liberty to
engage in these activities if they choose (an opportunity status) because of
these civil liberties and are protected by the law from interference in the
spheres where these rights can be exercised: of free speech and voluntary
association, the market, and the law. They are classic negative liberties,
protecting citizens from interference in these spheres.
Civil liberties and the rights of the person thus presuppose and are
predicated on a human being with a distinctively modern or juridical
form of subjectivity situated in a set of modern institutional and educational
preconditions. A modern person must be able to see him- or herself and
others from the universal standpoint of abstraction and freedom from
relationships with others and, as such, independent rather than dependent
(in relationships with others) or autonomous rather than heteronomous
251
(determined by something other than ones self-legislating will). This

modern subjectivity of civil personhood developed historically from the
Roman legal dichotomy between the master, who possesses liberty because
he is subject to his own will, and the slave, who lacks liberty because he is
subject to the will of another. From the standpoint of formal and abstract
independence and equality, civil persons are then at liberty to enter into
relationships with each other on the basis of consent and contracts (irrespective of substantive inequalities). These relationships are free relationships because the contracting parties give their consent. The collective
analogue is the civil understanding of the right of self-determination of
peoples. A people is said to be able to stand back and abstract itself from
inherited relationships both among its individual members and between it
and other peoples and in a mythologised, historical, constitutional convention or a hypothetical thought experiment reach agreement on the
basic laws they will subject themselves to and the international laws they will
enter into with other peoples. In obeying the law, they obey their own will
and remain at liberty.
At the centre of these civil liberties is the modern liberty to participate in
the private economic sphere and not to be interfered with; the right to own
property and enter into contracts. This is the modern liberty to engage in
the capitalist economy (market freedoms and free trade): to sell ones
labouring abilities on the market for a wage to a corporation or, for those
with the capital, to establish a corporation, hire the labour of others and sell
competitively the products on the free market to consumers. Private corporations gained recognition as persons with the corresponding civil
liberty of private autonomy (negative liberty) in the late nineteenth century.
Thus, paradoxically from a civic perspective, the first right of modern
citizenship is to participate in the private realm and to be protected from
interference by the citizenry and its representatives. This form of participation in the economic sphere (commercial society) is primary the liberty of
the moderns.
The modern civil liberty of private property and contracts accordingly
presupposes the historical dispossession of people from access to land and
resources through their local laws and non-capitalist economic organisations; the enclosure of the commons; the accumulation of dispossessed
workers into a free market of wage labourers and consumers; the concentration of the means of production in private corporations; and the imposition of modern legal systems of property law, contract law, labour law and
trade law that constitute and protect the system of free markets and free
trade. Thus, modern citizenship, in its basic commitment to the civil liberty
252
of private property and contracts, is grounded in and dependent on the

spread of these institutions of capitalism.19 It is also the major justification
for the spread of these institutions as the basis of modern liberty.
Accordingly, it is not only the coercive imposition of civil law acting
alone that is said to civilise the uncivilised natives. Capitalist commerce,
which, by rendering every person and society economically interdependent
and competitive within an imposed structure of law and contractual relationships, pacifies, refines, polishes, makes predictable and in concert with
the law and representative governments leads a crooked humanity, behind
its back and despite its natural asociality, towards perpetual peace.
(2) Liberties to participate. The second tier of liberties of modern citizenship is defined in relation to the second cluster of modern institutions:
representative government. They consist in the rights to participate in these
institutions if one chooses. In the language of modern citizenship, democracy and democratic are equated with and restricted to representative
government and democratisation with the historical processes that bring
these representative institutions and participatory rights into being. Other
forms of democracy, if they are discussed as democracies, are described and
subalternised in relation to representative government as the universal and
regulative ideal of democracy. These rights of the modern democratic
tradition are called public autonomy or the liberties of the ancients. They
comprise the ways the demos the citizenry of a nation-state as a whole
legally exercise their popular sovereignty. The exercise of these democratic
rights enables the people to have a democratic say with respect to the laws
and constitutions to which they are subject (and from which their citizenship derives), and thereby to balance the constitutional rule of law with the
demands of democracy (the rule of the people) in a modern (representative)
form. This representative form of democratic participation is contrasted
with direct democracy, which is characterised as an earlier form, incompatible with the size, complexity and individual liberties of modern polities.
Modern democratic rights include the right to vote for representatives in
elections, join parties, interest groups, NGOs and social movements, stand
for election, assemble, dissent and demonstrate in the civil or public sphere,
have the freedom of the (private) press, engage in democratic deliberations,
litigate in the courts, exchange public reasons over ratifying constitutional
amendments or participate in a constituent assembly, and engage in civil
disobedience and accept the punishment.
19
This summary draws on both Adam Smith and Karl Marx on what they called primitive accumulation. See Marx, Capital, pp. 873940. For the recent literature, see note 18 above.
253
Like civil liberties and their institutional preconditions, these democratic

liberties presuppose historically the dispossession of people from access to
political power through pre-existing local forms of citizenship and the
channelling of democratic citizenship into participation in the official
public sphere of modern representative governments in the West and their
global analogues. These historical processes are described as freeing people
from pre-modern forms of subjection and bringing democratic citizenship
to them. Participation is equated with activities of public arguing (deliberating), bargaining (organising, negotiating and protesting) and litigating
over changing the laws, since political power, the object of democratic
participation, is presumed to be exercised through the rule of law. The
aim is to ensure that the law is not imposed unilaterally on those subject to
it, but that they may, if they choose, have a representative say in making or
amending the laws, and thus see themselves, abstractly and representatively,
as co-articulators of the laws. This form of participation thus takes place (in
both practice and theory) within and reproduces the ground plan of modern
citizenship because the people participate as juridical citizens exercising
democratic rights within modern institutions and under the priority of
first-tier civil liberties.20
The second-tier democratic liberties are circumscribed by the first-tier
civil liberties in three main ways. Firstly, their exercise is optional. Members
of a modern political association are citizens and the association democratic
whether or not they exercise their participatory rights. To make participation a requirement of citizenship is to violate the civil liberty not to be
interfered with and thus is inconsistent with modern liberty. Secondly, the
primary use and justification of these rights in the modern tradition is to
fight for laws that protect the private autonomy of the moderns from too
much governmental interference or domination to protect the private
liberty of the modern individual. Thirdly, these rights cannot be extended
and exercised in the private sphere (as in economic democracy in the
workplace) for this would interfere with tier one liberties. When the leaders
of the great powers today (the G8) speak in sound bites of the spread of
freedom and democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, they are
referring to the module of tier one (freedom) and tier two (democracy)
20
This juridical framework of individual democratic participation also enframes the modern collective
right of self-determination in which a people have the right to form a modern state with the
characteristic institutions and within the international state system (or, if they are a people within
a modern state, then they must determine themselves within the constitutional constraints of that
state internal self-determination). See section 3 below, Volume I, Chapter 8; and Chapter 5, this
volume.
254
rights of citizenship and their underlying institutions of the rule of law,

markets, eventual representative government and the military as the imposition and enforcement institution.
(3) Social and economic rights. The third and weakest tier of modern rights
of citizenship comprises the social and economic rights of the modern socialdemocratic tradition. These are the citizenship rights won by working-class
movements struggling within the historically established priority and constraints of the first two tiers of liberties over the last two centuries in nationstates and international law. They are a response to the horrendous
substantive inequalities in wealth, wellbeing, living conditions and forms
of social power that go along with the unrestrained formal independence
and equality of first-tier civil liberties and the limited democratic rights of
the second tier. The modern social-democratic argument for them is that
they are the minimum conditions of the worst off actually being able to
exercise their civil and democratic liberties.21 The argument against them is
that they violate the economic liberties of the moderns by interfering in the
private sphere and economic competition, and thus must be subordinated
to tier one civil liberty and the limits of tier two. When the capitalist
countries triumphed over the socialist countries at the end of the Cold
War, the bargaining power of Western socialist and social-democratic
movements was undermined and neo-liberal governments were able to
dismantle many hard-won social and economic rights nationally and internationally in the name of spreading market freedoms and democratic
freedoms.
(4) Minority rights. The fourth tier of citizenship rights consists of
modern minority rights of multiculturalism, religious and ethnic groups,
multiple nations within states, and Indigenous peoples. These rights appear
to some modern theorists to violate one premise of modern citizenship, the
primacy of the individual legal subject. However, minority rights can be
defined as rights that, firstly, protect the individual members of minorities
from interference or dominance by the majority (and by the powerful
within the minority) and, secondly, empower members of minorities to
exercise their civil and democratic liberties in more effective ways than
through the institutions of the majority society. They thus can be designed
to enhance, rather than to challenge, the spread of modern citizenship. This
21
The substantive inequalities across class, gender, race, ethnicity, regions and the North and global
South open up an enormous gap between the formal possession of a legal right and the actual
wherewithal to exercise it effectively, yet the possession of the right is often equated with being able
to exercise it or being at liberty to exercise it, thereby eliding this de facto disenfranchisement of
millions of human beings.
255
is the major way that they have been implemented within modern nationstates and international law. That is, they too presuppose the dispossession
of minorities of their diverse forms of legal, governmental and economic
organisation and the integration of them into replication forms of modern
citizenship.
Within Europe, this modular form of modern citizenship became paramount during the centralisation and consolidation of the modern constitutional, representative nation-state and the capitalist economy. Diverse local
and regional forms of laws, governments and citizenship of village
commons, urban communes, counties, regional leagues where they were
not destroyed completely were marginalised or transformed and subordinated as they were brought under the rationalisation of the central institutions of the modern nation-state. Modern citizenship was nationalised as
local citizenship was subalternised. Generations of locals were gradually
socialised by education, urbanisation, military duty, industrialisation and
techniques of citizenisation to see themselves first and foremost as members
of an abstract and disembedded imaginary community of nation, demos and
nomos of formally equal citizens. In virtue of possessing the individual
liberties of modern citizenship attached to the central legal and representative institutions, they were encouraged to see themselves as participating in
a similarly abstract imaginary of the sovereignty of the people. The violent
dispossessions and transformations, and the countless civic resistances to
them, were described and justified in the social-scientific and normative
theories and traditions of modern, state-centred citizenship as processes of
modernisation and making the modern identity. These uneven processes
are said to free individuals from dependency on unfree pre-modern ways
and progressively make him and then her free and equal citizens with four
tiers of rights and duties, correlative to the four aspects of a fully modern
identity, and with the corresponding differentiation of institutionalised
value spheres in which to exercise them.
Citizens and especially non-citizens such as the poor, the property-less,
women, immigrants, excluded races, and others struggled and continue
to struggle within and against these civilising processes in Europe. When
they were not struggling for local forms of self-government, they fought to
be included in modern citizenship, to extend the use of political rights
beyond the official public sphere, to gain social and economic rights that do
more than prepare one for the market, and for minority rights that protect
alternative cultural, legal, political and economic organisation. These struggles were and are against the powerful actors who strive to circumscribe
citizenship to tier one civil liberties and a limited module of democratic
256
rights.22 Since these types of struggles are for new kinds of citizenship and by
means of people who are not official citizens, or official citizens who often
act beyond the official limits of citizenship of their generation, they cannot
be called practices of citizenship in the modern tradition. They are classified
as acts of civil disobedience or rebellion. If these illegal struggles are
successful and the extensions institutionalised, then the extensions are
redescribed retrospectively as stages in the development of modern citizenship and incorporated within its framework, as in the cases of working-class
struggles giving rise to social and economic rights, women gaining recognition as citizens, civil rights movements and recognition of cultural minorities.
Thus, what are seen as activities of citizenship by the civic tradition struggles
for new forms of recognition and extensions of citizenship fall outside of
modern citizenship with its institutional/status orientation.
3 the globalisation of civil and cosmopolitan
citizenship
I want now to examine how the modular form of modern citizenship has
been spread around the globe as global citizenship. It has been and
continues to be globalised in two forms. Firstly, the tripartite module of
a modern nation-state, the underlying institutions that modern citizenship
presupposes and, once these preconditions are in place, the specific institutions of modern civil citizenship has been and continues to be spread
around the world, at various stages of development, as the universal form of
political association recognised as the bearer of fully legitimate political
authority (sovereignty) under international law. Secondly, a modular form
of modern cosmopolitan citizenship has been and continues to be spread as
the universal form of global citizenship recognised as legitimate under
international law and global institutions.23
During the long period when Europeans were building modern nationstates with the underlying institutions of modern citizenship, they were
also, and simultaneously, building these states as competing imperial modern nation-states. As imperial states they built and defended vast overseas
empires that colonised (in various ways) 85 per cent of the worlds population by 1914. The imperial great game of competing economically and
militarily against other European great powers over the control and
22
23
Ishay, The History of Human Rights, pp. 63244.

Section 3 is based on the detailed studies and references to the scholarly literature in Chapters 1, 4, 5
and 7 of this volume. I have not repeated all these references here except for a few cases.
257
exploitation of the resources, labour and markets of the non-European

world and the counteractions of the non-European peoples co-created the
modern West and the modern colonised non-West. After decolonisation,
this great game continues, between the former imperial powers (renamed
the G8), exercising hegemony rather than imperium through the postSecond World War Bretton Woods institutions of global governance, and
over the renamed post-colonial world of more than 120 nominally free and
equal (sovereign), yet substantively still dependent and unequal, new modernising nation-states, constructed on the foundations of the former colonies and protectorates. The spread of modern citizenship and its institutional
preconditions beyond Europe can be understood only in the context of this
immensely complex contrapuntal ensemble of Western strategies of expansion and non-Western strategies of counteraction, and the effects of their
interaction over the last half millennium.
3.i Genealogies of global civil citizenship
The module of institutional preconditions of modern citizenship was
implanted abroad in the course of European expansion by a deceptively
innocuous apparatus that linked a right of global citizenship to imperial
power in a circular relationship. Formulated and exercised in different ways
by the different European powers in the early-modern period, the imperial
right of cosmopolitan citizenship for Europeans is called the right of commerce (ius commercium) or cosmopolitan right. From the earliest phase of
European expansion under Portugal and Spain to today, the great powers
have claimed the cosmopolitan right of their citizens, trading companies,
monopoly companies and multinational corporations to travel to other
countries and attempt to engage in commerce in two early-modern senses
of this term. The first is to travel the globe freely and converse with the
inhabitants of other societies. This covers such activities as the right and
duty of Western explorers, missionaries, religious organisations, voluntary
associations and academics to travel to non-Western countries in order to
study and classify their different customs and ways into developmental
stages of different societies and races; and then try to free them from
their uncivilised ways and teach them the uniquely civilised ways of the
West. This cosmopolitan right is the historical antecedent of the right of
modern cosmopolitan citizenship of civil society associations (modern
NGOs) to modernise and democratise people in the post-colonial world
today. The second sense of this cosmopolitan right is to travel and attempt
to engage in commerce (trade) with the inhabitants. This includes such
258
commercial activities as entering into contracts and treaties, gaining access

to resources, buying slaves, hiring and disciplining labourers, establishing
trading posts, making investments, establishing plantations and so on. At
first it was used by the European powers to establish imperial monopolies
over the exploitation of the resources and labour of non-European societies,
but monopoly imperialism gradually gave way to free trade or open door
imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This cosmopolitan right correlates with the duty of hospitality of the
host country to open their doors to free commerce in this dual sense. If they
inhospitably close the door to entry, break the contract or expropriate the
property of a foreigner who has engaged in commerce, or if they expel the
missionaries and voluntary societies, then the appropriate recognised legal
authority under the old law of nations, or imperial law of the respective
empire, or, later, international law has a reciprocal right to open the door
by diplomacy or military intervention (gunboat diplomacy), punish the
violation of the cosmopolitan right and demand reparations or compensation. The correlative duty of hospitality openness to free commerce
holds even if the cosmopolitan right was initially exercised unjustly: that is,
where a trading company used force and fraud to establish trade relations
and contracts in the first place. The early-modern duty of non-European
societies to open their resources to commerce dominated by the West
continues to be one of the core duties of transnational trade law agreements
today.
As with civil liberty within a modern state, this cosmopolitan right
presupposes a number of institutions. The host country must have or adopt
the legal, economic and cultural institutions that make possible commerce in
this broad sense (private property, foreign corporations, contracts, wage
labour, dependence on the international market dominated by the West,
openness to cultural conversion, protection of foreigners and so on). The
imperial power must either submit to and modify the local laws and institutions or impose a structure of commercial law that overrides and restructures
them, such as Merchants Law (lex mercatoria), the vast global system of trade
law that developed in conjunction with Western imperialism.
We can see that this cosmopolitan right is a right of citizens of the
civilised imperial states to exercise the first right of modern citizenship
(civil liberties of private autonomy) and a version of the second right (to
participate) beyond their nation-state and to be protected from interference
in doing so. The two rights of the trading company to trade and the
voluntary organisations to converse and convert also fit together in the
same way as within the nation-state. The participatory right to converse
259
with and try to convert the natives complements the primary right of
commerce since the inhabitants are taught the requisite forms of subjectivity and modes of civil conduct that go along with the commercialisation of
their society and its gradual civilisation. The discipline of slavery and
indentured labour on the plantations, the various forms of religious and
occupational education, and the military and civil training of dependent
elites at the top were seen as steps in the civilising process. From the modern
perspective, these two rights of cosmopolitan citizenship linked to imperial
power appear to bring the gift of the civilising institutions of law, commerce
and Western civility to a closed, uncivilised or semi-civilised world, gradually removing all savage (insubordinate) alterity and remaking it as the
subordinate image of the modern West. From the perspective of nonWestern civilisations and diverse citizenship, this cosmopolitan apparatus
of free trade appears as the Trojan horse of Western imperialism.24
In practice, this apparatus was used in three main strategies to globalise
the underlying institutions of modern civil and cosmopolitan citizenship.
Firstly, settler colonies were established that replicated the basic legal, political
and economic institutions of the imperial country in the Americas, Australia
and New Zealand. The settlement of these new Europes involved the
dispossession of the Indigenous peoples of their diverse civilisations, territories and resources, the genocide of 80 to 90 per cent of the population, the
marginalisation of those they could not enslave or assimilate (ethnocide),
the transportation of 12 million Africans as slaves to plantations in the
Americas, and the imposition of Western institutions of property and
rudimentary representative government (colonial legislatures). The colonies
gained independence from their empires by revolution or devolution and
developed the institutions of modern civil citizenship in ways similar to
Europe.25 After the Second World War, they developed modern minority
rights in domestic and international law as a tactic of internal colonisation
in response to the continuing struggles of 300 million Indigenous peoples
for their unceded sovereignty over their traditional territories; the very
territories over which these modern states claim to exercise unquestionable
sovereignty.
Secondly, indirect imperial rule opened non-Western societies to commerce by establishing a small colonial administration, often run by trading
companies, to rule indirectly over a much larger Indigenous population.
24
25
See especially Anghie, Imperialism; and David B. Abernathy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance:
European Overseas Empires, 14151980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
As in section 2.
260
A centralised system of Western colonial law was used to protect the

commercial rights of their citizens and traders, while also preserving and
modifying the local customary laws and governments so that resources and
labour were privatised and subject to trade, labour discipline and investment dominated by the Western trading companies. Local rulers were
recognised as quasi-sovereigns in their regions and unequal treaties were
negotiated. The local elites were made dependent on Western economic
and military power, undermining their accountability to local citizens, and
were employed to introduce modernising techniques of governance and
train the local army to protect the system of property, often against the
majority of their own population. This was the main way in which the
institutional preconditions of modern citizenship (and actual modern
citizenship for European colonials) were introduced in India, Ceylon,
Africa and the Middle East in the twentieth century.
The third and most recent strategy is informal or free trade imperialism. Here the imperial power permits local self-rule, and eventually selfdetermination, but within a protectorate or sphere of influence over which
they exercise informal paramountcy (now called hegemony and dominance). By informal means they induce the local governments to open their
resources, labour and markets to free trade and liberalisation by establishing
the appropriate modern institutions. These provide the foundations for
eventual modern citizenship with tier one market liberties preceding and
circumscribing the others. The means include structural dependency on
economic, military, technological and educational aid; the modernisation of
the population by Western experts and civil society organisations; bribes
and threats; training and arming local militaries and counter-insurgency
units (death squads); and low-intensity military interventions. This requires
in turn small but effective military bases strategically located around the
world, linked together by a global navy and (since the Second World War)
air force. These bases, originally coaling stations for the British navy, are
used to arm and train the local militias or to intervene themselves whenever
local citizens try to take control of their own economic and political affairs
and thereby violate their duty of openness to free trade.
This strategy of informal intervention imperialism was developed by the
British in the nineteenth century. However, it is the United States that has
taken the global lead, first in Latin America under the Monroe Doctrine and
then throughout the world by the end of the Cold War. Beginning with
over 1,000 interventions in sovereign Latin American countries in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the establishment of military/training bases such as Guantnamo Bay (1901), the United States now
261
has over 725 bases beyond its state borders. These are connected by a
network of navy, air force, satellite systems and the weaponisation of
space that continuously surveils and patrols the planet. Similar to the proconsuls of the Roman empire and the governors-general of the British, the
whole world is divided into four regions under the command of four
regional Commanders-in-Chief (CINCs) who report directly to the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. According to the Pentagon, this worldwide military empire
exercises full spectrum dominance over the informal global system of open
commerce and freedom.26
The cosmopolitan apparatus and its three strategies were gathered
together and formalised as the standard of civilisation in the creation of
modern international law during the nineteenth century. The European
imperial nation-states (and the United States after 1895) declared themselves
to be civilised states in virtue of their institutions of modern statehood and
citizenship (the modern rule of law, openness to commerce, representative
government and modern liberty were the main criteria). As such they were
the sole bearers of sovereignty and subject only to the laws they could agree
to among themselves, which they called modern international laws. Their
modern institutions provided a standard of civilisation in international law
by which they judged all other civilisations in the world as uncivilised to
varying degrees (depending on their stage of development) and thus not
sovereign subjects of international law, but subjects of the sovereign imperial powers through colonies, indirect protectorates and informal spheres of
influence.27 They asserted a right and duty of civilisation under international law. Civilisation referred to both the historical processes of modernisation and the normative end-point of a modern civil state. The duty to
civilise consisted in the consolidation and international legalisation of the
imperial strategies they began in the earlier period. The opening of nonEuropean societies to European-dominated commerce and property law,
the exploitation of their resources and labour, and the removal of uncivilised
customs that blocked progress were seen as the first steps of the civilising
mission. The second and equally important duty was to introduce into the
colonies and protectorates more systematic and effective forms of colonial
26
27
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2020, available at: www.dtic.mil/jv2020/jvpub.htm [Accessed
19 September 2007]. See the discussion and references in Chapter 5 of this volume, especially
Bacevich, American Empire. For the most recent account, see Greg Grandin, Empires Workshop:
Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2007). The classic is Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a
Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997). See Chapter 5, this volume.
The classification of non-Western societies followed the subalternising logic mentioned in section 1.
262
governance (or governmentalit) that would shape and form the dependent
peoples and races into civilised subjects eventually capable of modern selfgovernment.
This global civilising project under international law lacked an enforcement mechanism, and the civilising duty was left to the sovereign empires
and their voluntary organisations. The destruction, exploitation, oppression, despotism, genocide, and wars of imperialism and anti-imperial
resistance continued apace. They increased after the failure of the Berlin
Conference (1884) and the scramble for Africa, culminating in the barbarism of the First World War the great war of civilisation. In response to
these horrors and to contain increasing demands for decolonisation, the first
concerted attempt to operationalise the civilising duty under international
law was set up under the Mandate System of the League of Nations. The
League classified the subject peoples into three categories according to their
aptitude for tutelage in modern citizenship and gave the respective imperial
powers the mandate to civilise them as they increased their economic
exploitation, especially in the oil-rich Middle East.28
This citizenising project was interrupted by the decolonisation movements of the middle of the century. Although the overwhelming majority
of people fought for freedom from imperial dependency on the West or
the Soviet Union and for their own modes of government and citizenship,
the westernised and nationalising elites (subject to intensified economic and
military dependency) and the informal means of the great powers brought
about the continuity of the imperial processes of development. During
the Cold War and post-independence state formation in conditions of
neo-colonial dependency, the nation-building elites were constrained to
destroy or subordinate local economies and governments, enforce the
artificial colonial boundaries, centralise government, open their resources
to free trade, accept constitutions designed by experts from the imperial
metropoles and promise minimal institutions of modern citizenship, or face
sanctions and military intervention. The result tended to be constitutional
and institutional structures that either concentrated power at the centre or,
as in Africa, in both the urban and rural regions, replicating the worst
features of colonial administration in both types of case.29
28
29
Middle Eastern peoples were classified as capable of modern self-government and citizenship after a
period of tutelage; tropical Africans after a longer and more despotic period of guardianship; and
South Western Africans, Pacific Islanders and Indigenous peoples were classified as too primitive
ever to be civilised. See Callahan, Mandates and Empire, and Chapter 7, this volume.
Mahood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and for a comparative survey of constitutionalisation
263
During the same period, the cooperating great powers set up the institutions of global governance through which informal imperial hegemony
and post-colonial subalternity could be continued. These are the concentrations of power in the permanent members of the Security Council of the
UN, the WB, IMF, GATT, the WTO after 1995 and its transnational trade
agreements (such as TRIPS and GATS), modernising NGOs, NATO and,
emerging as the indispensable leader and guarantor after 1989, the United
States with its global system of military dominance.
At the request of the newly independent states, the language of civilisation was removed from international law and the UN.30 However, it was
immediately replaced with the language of modernisation, marketisation,
democratisation and globalisation with the identical grammatical structure.
This language signifies universal processes of development with the single
end-point of modern citizenship and its institutions, and it ranks all alternatives in relation to its regulative ideal. These processes are now to be
brought about, not by a civilising mission, but by the global governance of
the informal coalitions of the modern (or post-modern) states and their
multinational corporations imposing good governance through the global
institutions (WB and IMF), and by modern cosmopolitan NGOs building
civil societies and making civil subjects in the less developed states. This is
all backed up by the US military networks and alliances, for, as its neoimperial proponents forthrightly explain, the hidden hand of the market,
given its intolerable exploitations and inequalities, always needs to be
protected by the hidden fist of the military, and the savage wars of
peace.31 As the leaders of decolonisation movements recognised shortly
after independence, they were conscripted into an all-too familiar script, but
now in a new language of an abstract modern world system of free and equal
nation-states and global governance that was said to have come into being in
1648 (the Westphalian system), thereby concealing the imperial construction of this world and its persisting relationships of dependency, inequality
and exploitation.
30
31
since the Second World War, see Miguel Schor, Mapping Comparative Judicial Review,
Comparative Research in Law and Political Economy Research Paper Series 3(4), 2007, available at:
www.comparativeresearch.net [Accessed 31 August 2007].
See Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, pp. 196235; and Chapter 5,
this volume. However, a reference to the authority of the general principles of law recognised by the
civilized nations appears in International Court of Justice, Statute of the International Court of Justice,
38.1.c., available at: www.icj-cij.org/documents/index.php?p1 4&p2 2&p3 0 [Accessed 30 July
2007].
The hidden hand and the hidden fist are from Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree
(New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999), cited in Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, p. xx.
264

3.ii Unequal conscripts
The difference from the old colonial strategies of spreading modern citizenship is that the formerly colonised peoples are now seen as active, selfgoverning agents in these processes at home and in the institutions of global
governance (the G120). They are now bearers of modern civil and cosmopolitan citizenship, yet still under the enlightened leadership of the more
advanced or developed peoples. International law provides the basis for this
by promoting a right to democracy. Democracy and democratisation
projects are equated with first-tier civil liberties (neo-liberal marketisation)
and a short list of democratic rights (primarily elections). However, if
citizens become too democratic and seek to exercise their right of selfdetermination by taking democratic control of their own government and
economy, and thus violate their duty to open their doors to the global
economy and its laws, multinational corporations and democratisation
from above, one of two strategies follows. Either they are repressed by
their own dependent elites, democratic rights are further reduced or eliminated, and the governments become more authoritarian. Or, if the people
manage to gain power, the repertoire of covert and overt informal means
available to the great powers is employed to destabilise and undermine the
government, bring about regime change and institute neo-liberal structural
adjustment policies that promote tier one civil liberties of individuals and
corporations. As in the colonial period, the imposition of market discipline
is said to come first and lay the foundation for democratic rights. The result
in either case is the suppression or severe restriction of democratic citizenship, the corresponding rise of militarised rule and market freedoms on one
side and increasingly violent and authoritarian resistance movements on the
other. The countries that are subject to these horrendous oscillations are
described as failed or terrorist states, covert or overt military intervention
follows, resistance intensifies and instability persists.32
32
The recent War on Terror can thus be seen as the continuation of a much longer trend as many
scholars have argued. See Chapters 5 and 7, this volume; Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western
Footprints and Americas Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); and Rory
Skidelsky, The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq (London:
Harcourt, 2006), for the continuity with earlier British indirect rule in the Middle East; Tony Smith,
A Pact with the Devil: Washingtons Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise
(London: Routledge, 2007), for its continuity with Wilsonian intervention imperialism; Grandin,
Empires Workshop, for its continuity with US imperialism in Latin America; and Anghie, Imperialism,
for its longer continuity. Osama bin Laden also places the rise of al-Qaeda in the broad historical
context of Muslim resistance to Western imperialism: Osama bin Laden, Messages to the World: The
Statements of Osama bin Laden (London: Verso, 2005).
265
The consequence is that a restricted or low-intensity form of modern

civil citizenship is promoted or promised at the national level with an
equally low-intensity form of modern cosmopolitan citizenship of individuals and NGOs at the international level. The first wave of international
human rights after the Second World War sought to give protection to the
individual person from the worst effects of these processes (civil liberties)
and to elaborate a set of global democratic, social and economic, and
minority rights similar to those at the national level. However, these are
hostage to implementation by nation-states and thus subject to the processes described above. The second wave of international law brought into
force a vast array of transnational trade law regimes (under GATT and the
WTO) that override national constitutions and constrain the weaker and
poorer countries (which contain the majority of the worlds population) to
open their economies to exploitation and pollution dumping in order to
gain loans, aid and debt relief. The third wave of international law after the
al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of 9/11
consists of Resolutions of the Security Council of the UN promoting
international security. These global securitisation regimes, which protect
the security and liberty of modern citizens, often override the first wave of
international human rights, force national governments to enact security
legislation that rolls back hard-won democratic rights, thereby circumscribing democratic opposition to the War on Terror and neo-liberal globalisation, and secure civil and cosmopolitan market liberties of individual and
corporate citizens in national and transnational law.33
This new articulation of the old cosmopolitan Trojan horse is now the
major justification for the continuation of Western informal imperialism, as
we see in Iraq and Afghanistan today. The opposition parties on the left
criticise neo-liberal and neo-conservative policies and offer a more socialdemocratic and multilateral alternative strategy, yet they do so entirely
within the shared languages and institutions of modern citizenship. The
result is not only continued popular resistance, escalating militarisation and
instability, as above, but escalating global inequalities between the West and
the non-West that are worse now than at the height of the ruthless phase of
Western imperialism at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Approximately 840 million people are malnourished. There are 6 million
children under the age of five who die each year as a consequence of
33
For these three waves of international law, see Ishay, The History of Human Rights, pp. 173356; Kim
Lane Scheppele, The International State of Emergency: Challenges to Constitutionalism After
September 11 (Unpublished Manuscript, Princeton University, 2007); and Chapter 7, this volume.
266
malnutrition. Roughly 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 a day and half
the worlds population lives on less than $2 a day. Ninety-one out of every
thousand children in the developing world die before they reach the age of
five. Twelve million die annually from lack of water, and 1.1 billion people
have no access to clean water. About 2.4 billion people live without proper
sanitation, while 40 million live with AIDS, and 113 million children have
no basic education. One in five does not survive past forty years of age. Of
the 1 billion non-literate adults, two-thirds are women and 98 per cent live
in the developing world. In the least developed countries, 45 per cent of the
children do not attend school. In countries with a literacy rate of less than
55 per cent, the per capita income is about $600.
In contrast, the wealth of the richest 1 per cent of the world is equal to
that of the poorest 57 per cent. The assets of the two hundred richest people
are worth more than the total income of 41 per cent of the worlds people.
Three families alone have a combined wealth of $135 billion. This equals the
annual income of 600 million people living in the worlds poorest countries.
The richest 20 per cent of the worlds population receive 150 times the
wealth of the poorest 20 per cent. In 1960, the share of the global income
of the bottom 20 per cent was 2.3 per cent. By 1991, this had fallen to
1.4 per cent. The richest fifth of the worlds people consume 45 per cent of
the worlds meat and fish; the poorest fifth consume 5 per cent. The richest
fifth consume 58 per cent of total energy, the poorest fifth less than
4 per cent. The richest fifth have 75 per cent of all telephones, the poorest
fifth 1.5 per cent. The richest fifth own 87 per cent of the worlds vehicles,
the poorest fifth less than 1 per cent.34 As a result of the globalisation of
modern citizenship and its underlying institutions, the majority of the
worlds population of landless labourers are thus at liberty to exercise their
modern liberties in the growing sweat shops and slums of the planet.35
We can see that the globalisation of modern citizenship has not tended to
democracy, equality, independence and peace, as its justificatory theories
proclaim, but to informal imperialism, inequality, dependence and war.
This tendency is intrinsic to the modern mode of citizenship as a whole.
From within its institutions, modern citizens see their citizenship as universal, superior and what everyone else would assent to if they were only
freed from their particular and inferior ways. Accordingly, they see
34
35
Seabrook, The No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty, p. 53. See Chapter 7, this volume. For the
measurement of global inequalities, see Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart: Measuring International and
Global Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Mike Davis, A Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2005).
267
themselves as having the cosmopolitan right and duty to enter into other
societies to free them from these inferior ways, impose the institutional
preconditions of modern citizenship, which bring obscene profits to their
corporations and unconscionable inequality to the people they are modernising, and remove the obstacles and resistances to progress. The background languages of universal and necessary modernisation and of universal
and obligatory norms and institutions of the four tiers of modern citizenship that they project over the global field render the whole ensemble selfvalidating in theory and practice. In carrying it forward, modern citizens are
only doing what is both inevitable and right. When others resist, this proves
that they are not yet fully civil and rational and legitimates the use of more
coercion in response, thereby creating the conditions of its validation and
expansion.
From the perspective of diverse citizenship, this mode of citizenship is
neither freedom nor democracy but the culmination of five hundred years
of relentless tyranny against local citizenship and self-reliance. It is the
undemocratic imposition of a low-intensity mode of citizenship over others,
in which the people imposed upon have little or no effective democratic say
as citizens, and under which they are not free and equal peoples but subjects
of imperial relationships of inequality, dependency and exploitation.
D IV E R S E CI T I Z E N S H I P
4 diverse civic citizenship

I want now to move around and survey the same contested field of global
citizenship from the orientation and practices of the other, diverse mode of
citizenship. To begin this difficult movement, I start from a brief synopsis of
the globally predominant modern mode of citizenship we examined in the
first part of this chapter on civil citizenship. I then show how diverse citizens
apply their critical attitude to free themselves from taking its language as the
comprehensive language of citizenship. They thus enable us to disclose and to
see the field of citizenship and the place of modern citizenship within it from
the comparative perspectives provided by other languages of citizenship.36
Synoptically, modern citizenship is a status consisting of four ranked tiers
of rights and duties that make sense and are exercised within a canonical
set of underlying legal, political, economic, educational and military institutions of the modern nation-state, international law and global
36
Section 4 draws on the detailed discussion of the civic tradition in all the chapters in the two volumes.
268
governance. Modern citizenship is presented as the institutionalisation of

civil liberty or freedom (freedoms of the person and the market) and
democracy (representative government and participation in the public
sphere). It is universal in virtue of three constitutive languages: worldhistorical processes of modernisation that bring these institutions into
being through stages; the normative ideal of modern citizenship and its
institutions presented as the universal form of citizenship for every human
being and as the telos of the causal processes; and the comprehensive
disclosure and ranking of all other modes of citizenship as either not really
citizenship or historically and culturally inferior relative to modern citizenship. Because it is the universal form and the Western states are closer to
realising its ideal form (more developed), they have a right and duty to bring
its underlying institutions, beginning with tier one institutions, to the less
developed by means of the civilising apparatus and its many strategies.
They also have the duty to defend this unfinished project against those who
fail to conform, for it is the mode of citizenship everyone would assent to if
and when they exchange public reasons and reach agreement within the
universal civil institutions of modern citizenship.
The discussion and criticism of citizenship takes place within these background languages of disclosure of the field of citizenship and the corresponding modern institutions. Questions of citizenship always lead back to the
juridical subject with rights and underlying institutions, the social-scientific
theories of historical processes that bring them about, and the normative
theories of its ideal universal form and justifications for its globalisation. As it
is spread around the globe, this particular world picture in all its complexity
becomes the living identity of modern citizens and of those who see themselves as on their way to becoming modern. It is difficult to free moderns from
this world picture, for it lies in the languages they use and the globalised
institutions in which they use them and project them over others. One thinks
that one is thinking and acting critically with respect to the very essence of
citizenship, yet one is predicating over and over again the modern representation of citizenship onto the field of citizenship.
Members of the tradition of diverse citizenship see this self-described
universalism and cosmopolitanism as one of the most dangerous forms of
circular parochialism and fear of alterity. It appears as the prejudice of taking
ones familiar form of national citizenship as the only acceptable form,
projecting its hierarchical classifications over others and trying to make
them over in ones own parochial image, with the disastrous effects we have
surveyed. How, then, do diverse citizens avoid being taken in by this
captivating world picture, exercise their critical attitude on it, and sustain
269
a multiplicity of alternative forms of citizenship, thereby making the actual

contrapuntal global field of citizenship qualitatively different from the
subordinate mirror-image of themselves that the modern mode of citizenship presents to its captivated citizens? I think the answer is a practical one.
They avoid assimilation and sustain alternative worlds by acting otherwise
by participating in other practices of citizenship (often in the same institutions). I will try to elucidate these alternatives by comparing and contrasting
fifteen aspects of diverse civic citizenship with modern civil citizenship in
this section and six aspects of diverse glocal citizenship with modern
cosmopolitan citizenship in section 5. Many of the aspects of civic citizenship are aspects of glocal citizenship as well.
(1) Praxis. The first and fundamental difference between the two traditions is their basic orientation. Rather than looking on citizenship as a status
within an institutional framework backed up by world-historical processes
and universal norms, the diverse tradition looks on citizenship as negotiated
practices, as praxis as actors and activities in contexts. Civic activities
what citizens do and the ways they do them can be more or less
institutionalised and rationalised (in countless forms), but this is secondary.
The primary thing is the concrete games of citizenship and the ways they are
played.37 The modern tradition in social science and political theory overlooks these activities because it presupposes that the rights, rules, institutions and processes must be primary (the conditions of civilisation) and
human actors and activities secondary (what happens within the civil space
constituted by the civilising rights, institutions, rules and processes). The
diverse tradition reverses this modernist, institutional orientation and takes
the orientation of citizens in civic activities in the habitats in which they are
enacted and carried on. Institutionalisation is seen and analysed as coming
into being in unpredictable and open-ended ways out of, and in interaction
with, the praxis of citizens sometimes furthering, strengthening and
formalising these activities; at other times dispossessing, channelling, dominating, cancelling, downsizing, constraining and limiting.
Civic citizenship does not take a practice of civic activity as a form of
organisation within which civic activity takes place, for this would be to
treat civic activity as resting on some proto-institutional background (rules,
37
As I intimated in the introductory section, my formulations of several aspects of civic citizenship,

including this one, draw on Wittgensteins complementary work on explicating language from the
perspective of the activities of language users in the Philosophical Investigations. His central insight that
it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language game is at one with the civic orientation
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1974), 204).
270
conditions, processes). Rather, civic citizenship consists of negotiated practices all the way down. It comprises civic activities and the on-going
contestation and negotiation of these practices by the participants and by
those subject to and affected by yet excluded from them, and so on in turn.
There is never the last voice or word. The form of a civic practice is never
closed by a frontier but always open to negotiation. The skills of civic
citizenship consist in learning not only how to play by the given rules of a
civic practice but also how to enunciate a critical question about the rules
(and their theoretical justifications) and to listen attentively for voices that
are silenced or misrepresented by the official rules or the most powerful
critics. These continuing negotiations of practices of civic citizenship are
themselves activities of civic citizenship that keep the internal organisation
of civic activities open and democratic. As we saw in the introductory
section, this is just to acknowledge and build into the practice of citizenship
a repressible yet irreducible feature of it.38
(2) Diversity. The second way the diverse tradition avoids the prejudice of
mistaking one institutionalised form of citizenship as the model for all
possible forms is to take any specific civic activity in context as one local
negotiated practice of citizenship among many. The way that diverse
citizens do this is always to keep the multiplicity of games of citizenship
in view (even within their own civic organisations). This enables them to
resist (and refute) the temptation to generalise or universalise from a small
number of cases and the corresponding contempt for the particular case.
They can thus avoid (and deflate) universalising questions such as What is
citizenship? and the presumption that there must be one general answer;
usually, as we have seen, simply the projection of ones own familiar
example. Diverse citizens take any example of citizenship no matter
how universal or global its own language of self-description and justification
claims to be as an example, a particular and local form of citizenship in its
environs (as I have tried to do for modern citizenship). In contrast to the
universalising rationalities of modern citizenship, diverse citizens employ
contextual and comparative genres of reasoning (section 1 above). They start
from the local languages and negotiated practices of citizens on location and
compare and contrast their similarities and dissimilarities with each other
from various standpoints, either by engaging in other forms of citizenship or
by civic dialogues among diverse citizens. There is thus no comprehensive
and universal language of citizenship that defines all others in relation to one
ideal form, but, rather, a multiplicity of criss-crossing and overlapping partial
38
See Volume I, Chapters 6 and 9 for how this is being done.
271
and always-incomplete languages of similarities and dissimilarities woven

into their practices, employed for various purposes, of which the language
of modern citizenship can be seen to be one singular example masquerading
as comprehensive. By these situated alternative means, genres of comparative
reasoning and critical dialogues, citizens disclose the civic world as a diverse
multiverse, and their civic attitude is one of diversity awareness.39
(3) Participatory freedom. Since civic activities are primary, people do not
become civic citizens in virtue of a status defined by rights and guaranteed
by the institutions of the constitutional rule of law. From the civic perspective, civil citizenship indicates that one is a subject of a system of laws and a
member of that association. Rather, agents (individual or collective)
become civic citizens only through actual participation in civic activities. It
is only through apprenticing in citizenship practices that one comes to
acquire the characteristics of a citizen: linguistic and non-linguistic abilities,
modes of conduct and interaction in relationships with others, forms of
awareness of self and other, use of equipment, the abilities of questioning
and negotiating any of these features and of carrying on in new and creative
ways. This distinction between citizenship primarily as an institutional
status and as a negotiated practice is made in a number of different ways.
Let me mention three.
The most familiar way is the linguistic distinction between civil (lawbased) and civic (activity-based). Whereas civil citizens have the legally
guaranteed opportunity to participate in the civil sphere if they choose, civic
citizens engage in and experience civics the activities and practical arts of
becoming and being a citizen, referred to as civicism. Civic citizenry are
not seen as the bearers of civil rights and duties but of the abilities,
competences, character and conduct acquired in participation, referred to
as civic virtues.40 Civil citizens are civilised by the institutional rule of law,
commerce and anonymous processes of civilisation, whereas civic citizens
criticise and reject this disempowering picture that conceals the real world of
39
40
For this mode of reasoning together, see Volume I, Chapter 2, and for its history see Tully, Strange
Multiplicity.
It is tempting to say that the tier two rights of participation of civil citizenship might be thought of as
equipment for a certain type of civic citizenship (in the civil sphere of modern states and global civil
sphere), and so they overlap to this extent. But, even here, this is not completely accurate, as you can
have these rights and not be able to exercise them for all sorts of reasons (financial, time constraints,
lack of knowledge, fear of consequences, etc.) and thus not even reach the stage of developing the
corresponding abilities through practice. And, of course, this particular equipment, as important as it
is, is not necessary for participation, since millions participated and continue to participate in civic
struggles for rights of this kind and for extending them without having them. Rights are neither
necessary nor sufficient conditions of citizenship.
272
histories of civic struggles. They civicise themselves. They transform

themselves into citizens and their institutions into civic spaces and free
cities by civic activities and the arts of citizenship, whether or not these
activities are guaranteed by the rule of law or informal customs, or neither.
Civic citizenship is not brought into the world by coercion, the institutions
of law, the nation-state or international law, but by citizens engaging in civic
activities and creating civic worlds. As a consequence, participation in civic
activities cannot be a duty enforced by a coercive authority, for this would
be to put a civil institution prior to civic activities.41
Secondly, one of the oldest distinctions is between libertas liberty and
liberties of civil citizens and freedom of civic citizens. It is impossible to
predicate liberty on human action (liberty action makes no sense).
Rather, the formal grammar of liberty refers to a condition of being at
liberty (not under the will of another) that a subject has thanks to a law.
The civil citizen is at liberty to participate or not as he or she wills. In
contrast, the informal vernacular term freedom (freo, das Frye) is predicated
primarily on agents, action, activities and fields of activity throughout its
long history.42 The civic citizen manifests the freedom of participation. The
free citizen is free in engaging in civic activities and, eo ipso, making these
activities free. Civic freedom is not an opportunity but a manifestation;
neither freedom from nor freedom to (which are often absent or suppressed),
but freedoms of and in participation, and with fellow citizens. The civic
citizen is not the citizen of an institution (a nation-state or international
law) but the free citizen of the free city: that is, any kind of civic world or
democratic sphere that comes into being and is reciprocally held aloft by
the civic freedom of its citizens, from the smallest deme or commune to
glocal federations. It is not a matter of official civil liberties and offices being
open to participation, as civil theorists construe a free city, but of the
citizenry experiencing the civic way of life that makes it a free city, including
engaging in opening offices in the first place, as the civic theorists characterise it. Hence, the civic tradition finds one exemplar in the experience of
41
42
I thus see the coerced duty to participate as an (optional) instrument of the civil tradition and
incompatible with the civic, although some theorists who are classified as civic have seen it otherwise
(see below). My understanding of these two intertwined traditions is indebted to the invaluable
scholarship of John Pocock and Quentin Skinner and the wealth of scholarship their work has
inspired. For recent reflections, see Annabel Brett and James Tully, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of
Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Hanna Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and
Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 1011; and Pitkin, Are Freedom
and Liberty Twins?, Political Theory 16(4), 1988: 52352. This distinction is at the heart of Arendts
history of freedom (see Volume I, Chapter 4).
273
Athenian democracy as a civic way of life reciprocally sustained by democratic citizenship as the freedom of participation (isegoria).43
Finally, the priority of civic activities to civil institutions is marked by one
of the enduring conventions of Western law. This is the convention that
long use (usus) and practice brings into being the right (ius) to engage in
that activity, not vice versa. This is true not only of the origin of common
and private property and of the rule of law itself, but also of the right of
people to govern themselves over a territory. This right of self-government
the very normativity we are trying to understand comes from citizens
governing themselves over a long period of time and being acknowledged by
others. This sturdy structure of normativity is so indestructible that even
conquest and usurpation by the most institutionalised imperial states in the
world cannot extinguish it unless the citizens and descendants either consent to surrender the right (i.e. another citizen activity) or entirely give up all
the activities of governing themselves after generations of repressive and
assimilative occupation (which rarely happens).44 Institutionalised rights
come into being from the practice of corresponding activities and are
continued and guaranteed in the final analysis by the on-going activities.
This is precisely the civic view of the relation between citizenship activities
and citizenship rights.45 As we have seen, the civil tradition reversed this
orientation, for reasons we will see below (aspect 10).
Of course there is a Western tradition that also places a high value on
civic activity but presupposes that it has to take place within a canonical
institutional setting. The institutions of the Greek polis, the Renaissance
city-state and the modern nation-state are standardly taken as the institutional preconditions. This tradition can be seen as civic in a narrow or
circumscribed sense in contrast to the broad and extended sense that I am
explicating. However, it also can be interpreted as a democratic wing of the
civil tradition, since it takes an institutional form as primary and necessary,
differing only over the importance of democratic participation (tier two
rights). Consequently it shares the civil traditions commitment to the
coercive imposition of institutional preconditions and myths of founding.46
This latter interpretation thus seems more apt, since this tradition contradicts the primacy of practice and the commitment to a plurality of forms of
political organisation of the civic tradition (aspects 1 and 2). As we proceed
43
44
46
For this interpretation of Athenian democracy, see Moses I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern
(London: Hogarth Press, 1985).
See Volume I, Chapter 8. 45 See Tully, Strange Multiplicity, for this convention.
This is the tradition mentioned above that often endorses a coerced duty to participate.
274
we will see that such attempts to circumscribe civic activity in canonical

institutions are continuously undone by the democratic activities of civic
citizens and the institutions reformed by the activities.
(4) Partnerships. Whereas civil citizenship always exists in institutions,
civic citizenship always exists in relationships. There are two general kinds
of civic being-with relationships: (i) relationships among roughly equal
citizens exercising power together in citizen/citizen relationships of
solidarity, civic friendship and mutual aid (citizen relationships); and
(ii) relationships between citizens and governors (citizen/governance relationships). To see the importance of this aspect, we have to set aside the
dominant institutional language of the civil tradition (constitutions, rights,
autonomous rules, jurisdiction, states and sovereignty) and look at what
goes on before, within, beyond and often in tension with these institutions.
What we see are individual and collective actors in citizen and citizen/
governance relationships. I will treat citizen/governance relationships first,
in which civic citizenship is the vis--vis of government, and then turn to
citizen relationships (aspect 11 below).
The language of relationships between governors and the governed (the
people) developed alongside the juridical and institutional language of modern citizenship in Europe as a way of describing government from a more
practical and interactive perspective (in contrast to the institutional language
of sovereignty, rule and obedience), yet still from the perspective of the
governing class.47 That is, it characterises the citizenry in the first instance
as the subject and object of the arts and sciences of government, namely as
the governed (or all affected). In the early-modern period, the language
of governorgoverned was used very broadly to characterise any relationship
of power and authority in which one actor seeks to govern to guide the
conduct of another actor: parentschildren, masterslave, masterservant,
companyemployees, sergeantsoldier, teacherpupil, governmentpeople,
colonial administrationcolonies, priestflock, masterapprentice, protg
mentor, older and younger friends, dance partners, and an individual governing his or her own thoughts, desires, will and comportment. Since the
phenomena of some agents guiding the actions of others in all these vastly
different ways are co-extensive with living in society and interacting with
others, relationships of governing and being governed were taken to be the
basic unit of analysis, beneath, within and beyond the more formal institutionalisation and rationalisation of these relationships in the centralising
institutions of modern European societies.
47
See Volume I, Chapter 3 and Chapter 2, this volume, for the language of governors and governed.
275
As the modern nation-state consolidated and brought many relationships

of governance under its direct or indirect auspices, the terms government
and the governed came to be restricted to the formal institutions of
representative government and its civil citizens in the official public
sphere. Modern political science and theory restricted its focus to these
institutions, as we have seen, leaving the other relationships of governance
in the official private sphere to other specialised disciplines. However, since
our conduct is governed in a multiplicity of overlapping ways in contemporary societies and global networks that do not all pass through legal and
political institutions, the language of governance in its broad sense has been
rediscovered and used anew to analyse in detail the actual workings of
contemporary relationships of power, knowledge and subjectification by
the governmentalit and global governance schools (among others). These
two schools can analyse anything from the most specific forms of face-toface power relationships or the ways media conglomerates govern our
thoughts and desires in detail to the most general modes of informal
power through which multinational corporations and coalitions of great
powers informally govern the conduct of subaltern states and populations in
relation to production, consumption and the environment, through global
relationships that bypass, outrun or manipulate traditional legal and political institutions. No matter how anonymous these relationships may
appear, especially from an institutional perspective, and no matter how
clever those responsible are in evading their responsibility, a relationship of
governance can almost always be traced back to identifiable agents who
govern (directly or indirectly) on one side and agents who are governed on
the other (as environmental movements have shown time after time).48
Civic citizens share the view that humans are always already in relationships and that many are relationships of this general governance kind (in
both its restricted and broad sense). However, while all relationships can be
said to guide the partners in some way or another, only a large subset of
these can be characterised as governing the partners, in the sense of
directing in some more or less calculated way.49 They also realise that
the practical arts and sciences of government (restricted and broad) consist
in a wide variety of knowledges, means and strategies. The bodies of
knowledge under which people are picked out and governed comprise the
48
49
I discuss these two schools in Chapters 2 and 4, this volume.

Citizen relationships, for example, guide but do not govern (see below under aspect 11). Relationships
of love and of friendship are other examples, even though they can involve episodes of governing one
another.
276
range of human, environmental, policy and administrative sciences that

modern governments and governing organisations in the private sphere
employ to govern their members, all affected and their relationships with
each other. The means can range from the mobilisation of the consent of the
governed on one side to the use or threat of violence and force on the other.
The strategies can range from the most detailed governance of individual
preference and character formation through techniques of consultation and
deliberation to the global use of sanctions, financial manipulation and
military manoeuvres. However, this is where the civic school parts company
with the governmentalit and global governance schools. Civic citizens rotate
the whole orientation around the axis of their real need and examine
governance relationships from the standpoint of the partner who is
governed not as a governed subject but as an agent, a civic citizen.
(5) Citizen/governance partnerships. Accordingly, the fifth aspect is the
characterisation of governance relationships as relationships between citizens and governors. At the heart of any governance relationship and constantly animating it is the freedom of the governed as citizens. A relationship
of governance does not act directly on the body or mind of the governed,
determining their behaviour in detail (or it would be a relationship of force
and determination). Rather, it acts on and conducts the conduct of the
governed partners (their actions, thoughts, expectations, comportment) to
induce them to acquire a predictable form of subjectivity (to become selfgoverning subjects in the relationship). In this sense, governance always
presupposes and acts on subjects who are free. That is, they are individual
or collective agents who are faced with a limited field of possible ways of
thinking, speaking, acting, organising and conducting themselves within
the (rules of the) relationship, including the many arts of appearing to
conform while acting otherwise within. And, furthermore, if they refuse to
be governed in this way and to work within the relationship, there is also a
range of possible ways of directly confronting and negotiating the limits of
the relationship itself, from the acceptable procedures of grievance and
negotiation, strike and direct action to strategies of disobedience, revolt
and revolution or escape. The aim of governance is to try to guide (induce,
disallow, anticipate and respond to) the freedom of the governed in their
activities so they disclose and act on the field of possibilities open to them in
predictable, utile and productive ways.50
50
This specific description of situated freedom in governance relationships draws partially on the late
Foucault, who introduced it into his own work only in 1980. See Volume I, Chapter 3. My development of it departs from Foucault in a number of ways.
277
The freedom of Spielraum (free play) in the field of any relationship is

both the existential field the room or space of manoeuvrability (the range
of possible moves) and the experiential ways in which the partners can and
do disclose and act on their possibilities the games (Spiel) they play in the
relationship or in the confrontation of its limits. This twofold freedom is the
field freedom of human beings in so far as they are field beings in
relationships. Field refers to the broad sense introduced in the introductory section, which includes the primary sense of the field in the natural
world where freedom takes place. Field freedom is irreducible, and it exists
and is enacted to widely varying degrees in different relationships.51 This
freedom exists in the playful guidance relationship between parent and
child long before language acquisition, between pupil and teacher in
pedagogical relationships, in the creative extension of the frontiers of
linguistic relationships (as Wittgenstein taught us at the beginning), to a
narrow degree in tightly governed institutions (prisons), and more broadly
in informal imperial relationships. The governed partner is thus always an
active agent an apprentice player who must learn how to navigate and
negotiate his or her way around the field and how to play the game through
acting and interacting with the governing partner. The governor is always
an interactive partner to some extent, drawn into the game of giving further
instructions, answering questions, correcting conduct, responding to seemingly untoward rule-following and so on. Humans are always unavoidably
homo ludens, creative game players and prototypical civic citizens in the
dialogical relationships of their cultures and civilisations before and as they
take on any other identities.52
Since the governed in any relationship are always already active agents
partaking in guiding and being guided in countless ways, they have to
engage in practices of self-formation by which they develop the abilities to
act and interact in the relationship. These embodied or phenomenological
abilities of knowing how to mutually acknowledge and interact with self
and others in intersubjective relationships begin to develop in the earliest
days of childhood, long before language use and training in specific roles.
51
52
This way of describing freedom in a field draws on Maurice Merleau Ponty. An influential use of
Spielraum in a somewhat similar way is Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and
Row, 1962), p. 185 [I.5.31]. However, I have learned more from Martin Bubers innovative attempts to
place this field of freedom in dialogical relationships and link it to a concrete global politics of nonviolence and peace, as I am trying to do as well. See his I and Thou (New York: Scribner, 1970) and
Between Man and Man (London: Routledge, 2002).
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955);
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1986). See Volume I, Chapter 4.
278
Apprentices in specific roles usually initially engage in these practices under

the direction of the governing partner or peers, and then gradually develop
the abilities to perform the role self-critically, creatively and without further
direction, but never without further negotiation. One does not become a
practitioner blindly. The requisite abilities are acquired in pre-linguistic
interaction and by more or less elaborate and reflective practices of the self
on the self in the course of learning ones way around in a specific relationship. Language learners and novitiate students, for example, gradually
become self-critical and self-educating language users and competent students, each with their own individual and distinctive style, through years of
study, practices and exercises of self-formation. The explicit practices of selfformation in any relationship and the more general phenomenological
practices that underlie these are the basis for the whole array of more
complicated practices of self-formation of civic citizens in citizen/governance
and citizen relationships.53
No matter how relentlessly domineering governors try to implant and
internalise these role-related abilities without the active interplay of the
patients, as if they are blank tablets, in behavioural modification experiments, repetitious advertising and total institutions of colonial and postcolonial discipline (such as internment camps and residential schools), they
invariably fail to construct the other all the way down. They cannot
eliminate completely the interactive and open-ended freedom of and in
the relationship or the room to appear to conform to the public script while
thinking and acting otherwise, without reducing the relationship to one of
complete immobilisation. As we have seen, they are reduced to trying to
induce and then respond to and work on the ways the governed conduct
themselves in the sparsely limited Spielraum open to them. This is the
constrained space in which Indigenous peoples and others have exercised
the arts of resistance and survived centuries of imperialisation.54
53
54
For background embodied phenomenological dispositions and their development into abilities prereflectively and reflectively, see John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press,
1995); Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Medina,
Language; Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collge de France, 19811982
(New York: Palgrave, 2005); Helen OGrady, Womans Relationship with Herself: Gender, Foucault
and Therapy (London: Routledge, 2005); and Volume I, Chapter 2.
See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990); see also Volume I, Chapters 7 and 8, and section 5 below. For the counterargument that humans are constructed all the way down in power relations and the difficulties in
accounting for critical freedom on this view, see David Hoy, Critical Resistance: From
Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). It is perhaps noteworthy
that several of the authors Hoy discusses moved to a view closer to the one advanced here.
279
If, therefore, we analyse a governance relationship from the side of the

governed as the citizenry, we can see that the free play of negotiation in
relationships is the ground of the civic freedom that manifests itself in civic
activities and to which governments respond. So, a relationship of governance is always a relationship of prototypical civic citizenship negotiation to
some degree, from the side of the governed. It is not a phenomenon of
unilateral control of the conduct of the other, but a much more complicated
and open-ended game of interplay and interaction between the arts and
practices of proto-citizens and governors. While governors, by their free
actions, try to structure the field of possible actions of the governed, the
governed, by their actions and in so far as they are citizens, try to govern or,
rather, citizenise the actions of their governors. If a defining characteristic
of governance relationships is the conduct of conduct, then it must always
be read contrapuntally: as governors and citizens reciprocally conducting
the conduct of each other and being conducted by their interaction in and
over the relationships between them.
(6) Types of activity. I am saying that we are always and everywhere protocivic citizens, engaged in practices of negotiating the fields of possibilities in
the relationships in which we find our feet and learn to walk. This overlooked, everyday, grass-roots world of proto-civic freedom in which the
official and more familiar activities of citizenship are nurtured and grow is
perhaps the greatest discovery of civic practice and philosophy. It is first and
foremost a discovery of feminist movements and of feminists reflecting on
this experience in a number of different disciplines. They have transformed
the civic tradition.55
To survey the field of civic citizenship practices, we need to differentiate
different types of cases that evolve out of this broad and so far undifferentiated field of proto-civic activities and cross the threshold to civic
activities of civic citizens. I want to say that there is no single answer to
the question of what makes negotiation in a governance relationship civics,
the negotiators citizens, and transforms the governance relationship into a
citizen/governance relationship (or a citizen relationship). Rather, in addition to the five signature aspects we have already considered, I will now set
out ten further features that distinguish civic (and glocal) citizenship
55
For feminist works on freedom in relationships to which I am particularly indebted, see Aletta Norval,
Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007); Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005); Heyes, Line Drawings; Peta Bowden, Caring: Gender-Sensitive Ethics (London:
Routledge, 1997); Kim Anderson, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood
(Toronto: Sumach Press, 2000).
280
practices from the unlimited field of proto-civic activities on the one hand
and from the restricted field of civil (and cosmopolitan) citizenship on the
other. These aspects are concerned with the types, characteristics and sites of
civic activities (aspects 69); the civic view of law (aspects 910); acting
together (aspect 11); the roles of civic goods (12); the relationship of civics to
the environment (aspect 13); non-violence (aspect 14); and the civic response
to structures of domination (aspect 15).56
To begin, we can characterise the broad field of civic (and glocal)
citizenship by means of five general types of civic activity. The first is
the wide or narrow range of activities recognised by and available to
citizens under their existing system or multilayered systems of government. These constitute the official field of civic activities that each
generation inherits from their forebears and carries on. Secondly, within
these official fields there is a range of ways of acting otherwise than the
dominant norms of civic conduct without challenging the official rules
governing citizen activity. This Spielraum of acting on the given possibilities in creative ways and playing the civic game differently within the
official rules is, as we will see, a world of civic pluralism and cultural
diversity unseen by approaches that presume rules determine rule-following (aspects 5, 89).57 The third and classic field comprises the activities
by which citizens no longer act within the field of a governance relationship but turn and negotiate some aspect of that relationship. Fourthly,
when citizen activities run against unjustifiable limits of the fields in
which they act, act otherwise and negotiate, they turn to civic activities
of directly confronting them (aspect 15). This range of activities from
protests to revolutions comprises the field of civic confrontation strategies.
The fifth and least studied type of civic activity emerges when sovereign
citizens turn aside from the governance relationships in which they find
themselves, create their own citizen relationships, act together and exercise
political power themselves (aspect 11).
Let us begin with the third, classic civic activity of we, the people
negotiating a governance relationship to which we are subject. This consists
in (but is not restricted to) calling some aspect of the relationship into
56
57
For the disclosure of the field of civic activity from a civic rather than civil perspective, see Nikolas
Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory Between Past and Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2006).
See Volume I and Chapter 8, this volume, for this type of civic activity. For an excellent introduction
to the whole field, see Wiener, The Invisible Constitution of Politics. I discuss it further under aspect 10
and in section 5.
281
question and demanding that those who govern enter into negotiations,
either within, over or without the acceptable procedures of negotiation
(including litigation). This is a demand literally to civicise the relationship:
to bring it under the shared negotiation and authority of the partners
subject to it. If successful, the governance relationship is no longer imposed
monologically over the governed who are constrained to negotiate their
activities within its prescribed limits. It becomes a more cooperative,
dialogical or citizen/governance relationship worked on by both partners
through on-going phases of negotiation in the broad sense: contestation
and critique, specific negotiations (arguing and bargaining), modification or
transformation, implementation, review, renegotiation by future generations and so on, world without end. To civicise governance relationships is
eo ipso to democratise them, for one of the oldest and most ordinary
meanings of democracy is that the people always have an effective say in
and over the relationships (rules) to which they are subject. The arts of
citizenship are precisely the democratic arts of critique, negotiation
and transformation of the governance relationships we bear into citizen/
governance relationships. This whole world of democratic negotiation in
the broad sense is the classic world of negotium (civic action) as opposed to
otium (the non-civic life of contemplation).58
(7) Civicisation. In contrast to the processes of civilisation and democratisation in the civil tradition, civicisation and democratisation are not identified with a set of Western institutions and processes of often coercive
imposition over other practices, but with citizens non-violently negotiating
and transforming the governance relationships in which they find themselves into citizen/governance relationships (or citizen relationships) from
the ground up. This is the heart of civic citizenship. As we have just seen,
this activity flows out of the proto-civic negotiated practices on the field of
possibilities within the relationship. Both partners (governors and governed) enter into and subject themselves to the give and take of negotiation
in and over the relationship they share. The governed become good citizens
only by exercising their civic freedom of entering into these kinds of
negotiation in all their complex phases: of listening to the other sides and
for silenced voices, of responding in turn, negotiating in good faith and
being bound by the results, experimenting with the amended or transformed relationship and so on. Reciprocally, governors become good governors only by doing the same: by listening to what the citizens have to say,
58
Volume I is a series of surveys of this whole field.
282
responding and being held accountable by them. A citizen/governance

relationship is an interdependent, interactive and open-ended partnership
of mutual enabling, nurturing and reciprocal learning. The unpredictable
evolution of the relationship and of the identities of the partners over time is
what the civic tradition calls progress. If the governed fail to exercise their
freedom of having a say in and over the governance relationships they bear
and speak truthfully to power, they never become citizens. They remain
unfree and servile slaves: that is, subjects of monological or despotic
relationships of command and obedience. It is like the life of exile, where
one may have negative freedom but not civic freedom. Reciprocally, if the
governors refuse to listen and enter into negotiations, and either silence
citizens or treat their demands as free speech to which they have no
obligation to respond, they never become good governors. They remain
unaccountable tyrants: independent and subject only to their own arbitrary will and appetites. Neither becomes a mature human being.
A superb presentation of the civic relationship of reciprocal enlightenment between free governors and free citizens, where there is neither master
nor slave but only free- and frank-speaking relationships (parrhesiastic dialogues) between partners, is the dialogue between Jocasta and Polyneices on
the value of citizenship in Euripides The Phoenician Women. The two
previous paragraphs are a gloss of this crystallisation of civic freedom.
Polyneices, who represents democracy, is returning from exile to free
Thebes from his brother, Eteocles, who broke the pact to share rule on an
annual basis and thus represents tyranny. He is speaking to his mother,
Jocasta:59
JOCASTA:
POLYNEICES:
JOCASTA:
POLYNEICES:
JOCASTA:
POLYNEICES:
JOCASTA:
POLYNEICES:
59
This above all I long to know: What is an exiles life? Is it

great misery?
The greatest; worse in reality than in report.
Worse in what way? What chiefly galls an exiles heart?
The worst is this: the right of speaking freely [parrhesia]
does not exist.
Thats a slaves life to be forbidden to speak ones mind.
One has to endure the idiocy of those who rule.
To join fools in their foolishness that makes one sick.
One finds it pays to deny nature and be a slave.
Euripides, The Phoenician Women (New York: Penguin, 1983), lines 38694. For the context of
practices of free speaking in unequal relationships of governors and governed, see Michel Foucault,
Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001). For my interpretation and
extension, see James Tully, La libert civique en contexte de globalisation, Les Cahiers du Juin 27
1(2), 2003: 110.
283
This account of interdependence and civic freedom in relationships also

stands as a critique of the priority and adulation of independence and
negative freedom in the civil tradition (as in tier one civil rights). Agents
who are independent and free of interdependent relationships, subject only
to their own will, are on the road to becoming arbitrary tyrants, disposed to
lording it over others and enslaved to their own whims and desires, as we
have seen with the history of Western imperialism. It is only by being
subject to democratic relationships with others and the practices of selfformation these require that those who govern can learn to discipline
themselves and serve the civic good. Reciprocally, if citizenship is only a
status, guaranteed by institutions, then citizens tend to become either
servile subordinates or arbitrary bosses in the vast sea of non-democratic,
hierarchical relationships in which they find themselves for most of their
lives. They tend to become unaccustomed, unable and too submissive to
exercise their civic freedom in the official public sphere, let alone in the
private sphere, and prone to submit uncritically to the socialisation and
media glorification of a life of negative freedom and private consumption
that accompanies tier one liberty and free trade.60 The powerful then
dismantle the democratic rights that earlier generations of civic activists
fought and died for.
As Jocasta and Polyneices agree, far from seeing dialogical relationships
with governors and fellow citizens as interference with their negative freedom, they identify with these free-speaking relationships, as the enabling
and nurturing conditions of their civic freedom and maturity. The crucial
kind of freedom is thus neither the freedom from relationships of interdependency (negative freedom) nor the freedom of acting in conformity with
allegedly ideal and universal legal relationships that we impose on ourselves
(positive freedom). It is the proto-civic and civic freedom of negotiating and
democratising in and over the always less-than-ideal relationships in which
we live and breathe and become who we are. The only guarantee of freedom
and democracy is, not surprisingly, the daily cooperative practices of democratic freedom in webs of relationships and on the fields of possibilities
they disclose.61
60
61
See Benjamin Barber, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow
Citizens Whole (New York: Norton, 2007). For the pathological aspects of a relentless drive for
negative freedom, see Frithjof Bergmann, On Being Free (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame,
1977).
For a history of civic freedom in the narrow sense vis--vis the more familiar traditions of negative and
positive freedom in the West, see Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New
York: Basic Books, 1991).
284
(8) Civic public spheres. Civic activity is not restricted to the official,
institutionalised civil public sphere of the modern nation-state and the
global civil sphere of cosmopolitan globalisation. One does not have to be
a civil citizen to engage in civic activity. In so far as an individual or group is
subject to the effects of a governance relationship, no matter how local or
global, they have for that very reason a civic right to act civically in relation
to it. A non-violent activity by the governed that brings the relationships
they bear into the open space of questions and negotiations is an instance of
the civic activity of citizens, no matter where it takes place, whether in the
official public or private spheres. A civic public sphere, in contrast to the
civil public sphere, comes into being whenever and wherever those who are
subject to a closed governance relationship take it out of the darkness of the
private sphere of being unquestioned, either in the sense of being taken for
granted and coordinating our interaction behind our backs or of being
explicitly placed off limits. They do this by calling it into question (speaking
truth to power), subjecting it to the light and enlightenment of public
scrutiny, and opening it to negotiation with the powers that be. They
become citizens, the space of negotiation becomes public, and the relationship itself becomes civicised and democratised to the extent that the governors enter into, and are subject to, the on-going negotiation of the
relationship between them. Hence the popular slogan, we are everywhere.62
These civic and publicising activities are not seen as acts of resistance or
rebellion, as they are seen from civil and governmental perspectives. It is
rather the powers that be who by refusing to enter into civic negotiations
and be held accountable engage in resistance and rebellion against civicisation and democratisation. They are also not seen as heroic acts of resistance
by great leaders and writers overcoming the habituation, interpolation,
conditioning or internalisation that construct the very consciousness and
body of the assimilated and colonised majority, as they are often portrayed
in the critical tradition.63 They are understood as the certainly courageous
yet non-heroic extension of everyday practices of negotiation in which
ordinary citizens are already engaged in the civic sphere. They consist in
nothing more (nor less) than disclosing the field of possibilities within the
62
63
As Nancy Fraser stresses, these unofficial public spheres are often more open and innovative than the
elite-dominated official public sphere. See Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the
Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. C. Calhoun
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). For an introduction to this aspect of the field, see Romand
Coles, Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005).
See note 54 above for this view.
285
relationship from the standpoint of concerned citizens and acting on it.64

Finally, they are not seen as the spontaneous irruption of unformed constituent power, for the civic powers are already exercised in, and extend out
from, everyday practices and relationships of governance.65
(9) Civic law. Why does the civic tradition construe cases of citizenship so
broadly, as participation in activities of negotiating the arbitrary constraints
of a field in governance or citizen/governance relationship at the most
appropriate and effective sites by those affected? In contrast to the civil/
cosmopolitan tradition, this seems too unruly. Civil law circumscribes the
exercise of democratic rights (tier two) to official citizens negotiating or
litigating the law in the official institutions of civil/cosmopolitan society and
in accord with their procedural rules, and, if necessary, their institutions of
amendment of these rules. Members of the civic tradition agree that these
are exceptionally important citizenship practices; noting as well that they
have been fought for, institutionalised, extended and defended by civic
citizens who did not initially have a right to them. But, they argue, to place
these institutional limits on citizenship is to impose limits on democratic
citizenship that are unsustainable in practice and unjustifiable in a free and
democratic society. This follows from everything we have already said about
the open-ended character of negotiated practices since the introductory
section. However, it can be seen most clearly by comparing the civil and
civic conceptions of law: the (civil) rule of law as an institution and the
(civic) rule of law as a practice.
The civil tradition makes a fundamental distinction between the institutional rule of law and the citizen activities that take place within the
boundaries of these institutional settings. The institutionalised rule of law
exhibits a systemic or functional quality of formality and independence
from the agents who are subject to it and act within its boundaries. This
picture is encapsulated in the mantra, rule of law not of men. The features
of institutionalisation and rationalisation that establish the independence
of the rule of law from the rule of men and women consist in the definite
rules, procedures and training of the institutional offices, the hierarchical,
commandobedience relationships among the members, the specialised
division of labour, the separation of knowledge from use, reflexive monitoring and the systematic application of coercion to align behaviour with rules.
That is, it is the non-democratic and procedural character of the relationships within an institution that gives it its formality and independence from
the informal rule of men. The language of governance is replaced by that of
64
Norval, Aversive Democracy, Chapter 3.
65
For these alternatives, see Chapter 7, this volume.
286
administration, management, control, discipline, procedure, direction and

monitoring. As a consequence, the rules and procedures of an institution are
conceptualised as rails that the office-holders follow, like the operation of
an adamantine calculus according to definite rules. The roles of humans
seem to disappear.66 While there may be some room for manoeuvre in
individual cases of decision-making by an errant office-holder, this foreground
indeterminacy is absorbed by the systemic operation of the vast background
rules, procedures and hierarchical relationships of the institutions as a whole
that are untouched. If a background rule is challenged and negotiated, then
this proceeds as well within institutionalised rules and procedures.
Democratic rights (tier two) have their foundation in the institutional rule
of law, are protected by it and exercised within its boundaries. This is the
separation or disembedded thesis of the civil institutionalised rule of law.
In contrast, the civic understanding of the rule of law is of a network of
relationships of negotiated practices. Law is a craft or practical art rather
than a science. For example, men and women in ministries draft rules
(as Bills) to govern the relationships of their political associations; legislators
debate, negotiate and vote on enacting them as laws; lobbyists lobby;
administrators struggle to translate them into executable legislation and
rules for application; civil servants apply them and officers enforce them;
subjects try to figure out how to obey them in individual cases; experts
advise them; ordinary citizens, corporate citizens, civil society organisations
and media discuss and challenge them and take them back to their representatives or to the courts; lawyers argue pro and contra; judges discuss,
interpret, judge, write majority and minority decisions; the legislatures
respond, and so on. At each of these site-specific practices not only do
men and women negotiate the particular law in question (which is just
another rule), but they do so by acting in accord with the rules and
procedures that govern the relationships of their office. As we have seen,
the differentially situated players negotiate the Spielraum that the rules and
procedures disclose to them, no matter how explicit the rules are and how
many recursive sets of rules exist for the application of the rules.67
This is not to deny the importance of institutionalised procedures. It is
rather to observe that the way a person grasps a procedural rule is not itself
a procedure but a negotiated practice. The practical know-how attitude
66
67
For the misrepresenting role of the metaphor of the rule of law not of men and the calculus
conception of rule-following, see Gordon P. Baker, Following Wittgenstein: Some Signposts for
Philosophical Investigations 143242, in Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, eds. Stephen Holtzman and
Christopher Leich (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 4858, and Chapter 7, this volume.
See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 827, 198201; and Volume I, Chapter 2.
287
underlies the institutional know-that orientation and is ineliminable.

From this rule-maker, rule-enforcer, rule-follower, rule-challenger and
rule-interpreter perspective, an institutionalised rule is neither a rail nor a
calculus. It is more like a signpost. It points us to the complex network of
negotiation practices going on under its sign. Both our understanding of the
rule and the actual rule itself are immanent in the negotiated practices that
cannot be circumscribed. The living rule of law is the pattern of interplay
and interaction of the negotiated practices. This is the immanent or
manifestation thesis of the civic rule of law. The unfolding of the rule of
law, no matter how institutionalised and rationalised, is internally related to
the indeterminate negotiated practices of the law.68 In a word, civic citizens
have an interactive understanding of the law.69
If the civic thesis is plausible, not only should there be proto-civic
negotiation practices within the institutions of the rule of law but these
practices should extend in the course of things into demands for on-site
civic negotiations, just as we have seen in the similarly institutionalised
corporations of the official private sector. Historically, union movements
and collective bargaining associations have been the agents of such sporadic
civicisation of institutions. Over the last thirty years, there has been an
explosion of new demands for ad hoc practical negotiations of the rules and
procedures within the legal and political and administrative institutions of
contemporary societies. Public and private sector employees demand a
direct and effective say over the rules and covert conventions of the relationships they bear: hiring procedures; discriminatory practices; equity; the
organisation of work and time off; environmental practices; the right to
disclose and make public information and bad practices; whistle-blowing;
and so on. These activities dissolve the distinction between the civil institutions inhabited by civil servants and the exercise of democratic rights in
civil society by civil citizens. Civil servants demand to be civic citizens
within and over civil institutions, civicising their governance relationships at
work into citizen/governance relationships through the creation of tailormade alternative dispute-resolution practices. New departments, disciplines
and epistemic communities of dispute resolution have sprung up in universities
68
69
See Medina, The Unity of Wittgensteins Philosophy, p. 179. For a detailed presentation of this
pragmatic view of normativity, see Robert B. Brandom, Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing,
and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 366.
For an introduction of interactive approaches, see Antje Wiener, Constructivist Approaches
in International Relations Theory: Puzzles and Promises, Con.WEB 5 (2006), available at: www.
qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofPoliticsInternationalStudiesandPhilosophy/FileStore/ConWEBFiles/
Filetoupload,52215,en.pdf [Accessed 30 August 2007]; and Chapter 5, this volume.
288
and policy communities throughout the world, and the courts have supported this revolution on the grounds that its curtailment is unjustifiable
and unsustainable in a free and democratic society.70
(10) From legal imperialism to legal pluralism. We can now place the
separation thesis of civil institutionalisation in the broader canvas of
the first part of this chapter and see the two major roles it has played. In
the early-modern period, the civil theorists argued that the existing practices
of governance and citizenship constituted an informal, haphazard, conflictridden, uncertain and insecure crazy quilt of overlapping jurisdictions that
gave rise to the Thirty Years War. Civil philosophers, lawyers and administrators explained that only centralisation and institutionalisation would
resolve these problems of informal (under-institutionalised and underrationalised) practices of law, governance and citizenship.71 The modern
contract tradition of political and legal theory rose to prominence by portraying this dispossession of local uncertain practices of self-government in terms
of a hypothetical contract or agreement. Despite the empirical evidence to the
contrary, the recalcitrant local peoples could nevertheless be seen to be
individuals (or a collective people) who would consent to delegate or alienate
their powers and rights of local self-government to their new centralised and
incorporated governors, if they only knew their best interests, in much the
same way as they were contractually alienating their labour powers (formerly
exercised in the local governance relationships of guilds, crafts, commons and
so on) to the new institutions of private corporations. In exchange, they
received back from the institutions of government the security, certainty and
enforceability of modern civil liberties and democratic rights at the national
level. Their erstwhile local practices were portrayed in theory as a pre-political
state of nature or war and their new institutions as the embodiment of the rule
of law, not of men.
The idea that governors and citizens should exist in relationships of
mutual subjection was not abandoned but applied exclusively to political
relationships of representative government, where the elected government
governed the population and the opposition party governed the government in a system of competing parties (organised internally along institutional lines). Citizens could play a role in this by exercising their democratic
rights, but only in institutional elections and the civil sphere. This sphere
of representative government was surrounded by and anchored in the
new administrative institutions of the rule of law that provided the
70
71
See Volume I, Chapter 9.

See Hunter, Rival Enlightenments; and Tully, Diverse Enlightenments.
289
non-democratic basis of representative democracy. The prestige of the

institutional mode of organisation increased as more and more activities
were organised accordingly: new model armies and navies, workhouses,
public schools, factories, prisons, colonial plantations, labour discipline,
and the bureaucracies of the modern national and imperial states. In short,
it became the favoured organisational form of the modern mode of citizenship and its constitutive institutions.72
This transition to the modern institutional orientation undermined and
reversed the old civic law convention that authoritative rights and government derive from long use and practice. Political authority was defined as an
authority that was independent of relationships of interdependency and
called sovereignty. Sovereignty and right were now said to be above and
behind government; located in the central institutions of the modern state
and placed there by the agreement of the people themselves precisely
because they constituted a superior and uniquely modern form of rule,
combining a sea of institutionalisation with an island of representative
governance.73 The civil thesis of the superiority of institutional rule was
the hinge of the whole transition.
The second role of the civil institutionalisation thesis was to justify the
dispossession of the non-European world of its local forms of government
and citizenship. Under the civic convention that authority and right derive
in endless forms from long use and negotiated practices, the world was
already full of authoritative governments and citizenship practices and thus
there was no legal justification for Western imperialism. The way around
this obstacle to progress was to discredit non-European governments and
practices in the same manner as local governments were discounted within
Europe, as not sufficiently institutionalised and independent of practice to
be the bearers of formal law and sovereignty. Their laws were classified as
informal and customary, still internally related to the vagaries of everyday
practice, and the authority of their governors, if they were seen to exist at all,
was non-sovereign or, at best, quasi-sovereign, still directly dependent on
on-going agreement of the governed who could dissolve authority by
walking away from it. There was either no coercive mechanism in primitive
72
73
James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1993), pp. 970, 179261.
Tully, Introduction, in Pufendorf: On the Duty of Man and Citizen; Quentin Skinner, From the
State of Princes to the Person of the State, in Visions of Politics, Vol. II, Renaissance Virtues
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Skinner, Hobbes and the Purely Artificial
Person of the State, in Vision of Politics, Vol. III, Hobbes and Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge
290
societies or the arbitrary exercise of coercion by men in the more advanced

stages, but not the systematic application of coercion through the law
characteristic of the West. The more sophisticated theorists allowed for
lesser degrees of law and sovereignty, but mostly for the purpose of entering
into treaties that extinguished or subordinated that sovereignty, and for a
degree of continuity of Indigenous self-government after conquest, yet
under the sovereignty of European states. Non-Europeans thus were preemptively misrepresented as lacking precisely what Europe claimed to have in
virtue of its recent institutionalisation: the integration of law and coercion
separate from the ruled. Once the civic thesis was relegated to the pre-modern
and non-European by this sleight of hand, the imperialism of modern,
institutionally sovereign states could be justified by the Trojan horse that
claims to bring the institutional preconditions of modern law, government
and citizenship to a world rendered devoid of them.74
Given the pivotal justificatory role of the civil/institutional conception of
the rule of law in the global spread of the institutional form of organisation,
it is scarcely surprising that it is difficult to dislodge it, even after it has been
shown to be untenable in theory. It has been shown that no system of rules
could possibly be as autonomous as the civil thesis requires; that there are
differences of degree but not of the formal versus informal kind between
Western and non-Western legal and political orders; that negotiated, practical know-how is the ground of procedural competence; and that normativity remains related to use and practice in complicated ways. Despite these
refutations, the background picture continues to prevail. But, as always, the
most effective disproof is the pragmatic one. It includes the examples of
the civicisation and democratisation of civil institutions by their own
members that are so prominent today (aspects 8 and 9) and the obvious
ability of non-Western peoples to govern themselves by their own distinctive laws and ways (see section 5).
(11) Citizens acting together. I want to turn to the other general type of
civic relationship that I announced and set aside in the discussion of
partnerships (aspect 4): the citizen relationship. These are relationships
among fellow citizens as equals in which there is no citizen/governor
distinction. For the civic tradition, this is the more important type of
civic relationship. These are the relationships citizens form whenever and
wherever they act together as citizens in various activities. The relationships are civic and democratic partnerships among equals negotiating and
acting together. These are relationships of trust, conviviality or solidarity
74
Tully, Strange Multiplicity, pp. 5898; and Chapter 7, this volume.
291
and civic friendship across identity-related differences and disagreements of

various kinds. This is the realm of civic freedom as isegoria, citizens speaking
to each other in equal relationships about their common concerns, rather
than parrhesia, speaking to their governors in unequal relationships. On
occasion one partner may take the lead and the others follow, especially
when the task at hand requires specialised skills; however, it does not
become a citizen/governance relationship, let alone a governance relationship, because the leader ceases to be a leader whenever the followers cease to
follow. It then automatically becomes a relationship of equals acting
together again, and they co-organise or coordinate their interaction
co-equally. It is tempting to say that they govern together or are selfgoverning, but they are not governing in so far as this term entails the
correlate of the governed. They are neither governing and being governed
in turn nor simultaneously governing others and being governed by them.
They are exercising power together as citizens all the way down. The
citizenry cooperatively citizenise rather than govern the association composed of their citizen partnerships. They are literally doing democracy.
This is a distinct mode of exercising power different from governance and
institutionalisation.75
There are two main families of citizen partnerships. One is when citizens
organise themselves in order to negotiate in or over a citizen/governance
relationship, as in deliberative forums, collective bargaining, negotiating
NGOs, social movements and non-violent revolutionary movements if
their internal relationships are citizen partnerships. The other is when
citizens organise and run an entire activity on the basis of citizen partnership, not in relation to a government, but to citizenise the activity for its
own sake (rather than submit to institutionalisation or governance). The
classic examples of citizen partnerships are the celebrated practices of direct
democracy, village commons and urban communes throughout history and
today, such as Porte Allegre, autonomous communities in the North and
South, and the Zapatistas. However, the most ubiquitous and familiar
example is the vast array of civic cooperatives in the broad sense of civic
organisations comprised of citizen relationships.
If the private corporation is both the basis and flagship of modern
citizenship the institution in which moderns exercise their civil liberties
in competing, working, shopping and consuming then the commonplace
cooperative is the comparative organisation of the civic tradition. Here
citizens ignore the civil division between (non-democratic) private and
75
The verb citizenise first appeared in 1593.
292
(representative) public spheres, between civil liberties and democratic

rights. They participate as democratic citizens governing themselves directly
in the economic sphere (and other spheres), citizenising the same kinds of
activity that corporations privatise. In contrast to individual and corporate
competition in market relations, cooperatives are founded on the ethics of
cooperation. In the place of competitive free trade, they practise fair trade:
trade relationships based on non-violent democratic negotiations among all
citizens affected. In contrast to the goal of profit, many cooperatives are not
for profit but for living democracy and mutual aid. Instead of globalising
from above, they are grounded in the local first and foremost. All the human
creativity that is channelled into the world of commerce and private profit
by corporations is poured into experimentation with forms of democratic
cooperation by the cooperative movements.76 The most astonishing feature
of the countless cooperatives on the planet is that they manifest, in concrete
and practical forms, actual alternative worlds of democratic citizen partnerships within the interstices of the globally dominant political, legal and
economic institutions of modern citizenship. They do not organise to
overthrow the state or the capitalist mode of production, or to confront
and negotiate with governors to change this or that regulation. They simply
enact alternative worlds of citizen relationships around various activities,
refusing to abjure their civicism to privatisation or governmentalisation.
Cooperatives are thus classic examples of the unique civic activity of acting
together delineated in the discussion of types of civic activity (aspect 6).77
(12) Civic goods. A civic activity also has another important aspect, the
telos or good towards which the activity is oriented and which the activity
upholds and manifests. It gives the activity its civic character or ethos. A
civic telos is thus a civic good. Modern citizenship is egocentric; oriented
towards the protection of the liberty of individuals to be free from interference and to be free to exercise their autonomy in the private sphere (tier one
rights) or in the official public sphere (tier two rights). In contrast, diverse
76
77
For the contrastive dimensions of the private corporation listed in this paragraph, see Joel Bakan, The
Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (London: Penguin, 2004).
For an introduction to cooperatives and cooperative democracy in this broad sense, see the global
survey www.WiserEarth.org under Civil Society Organizations. For the history of consumer and
producer cooperatives respectively, see Ellen Furlough and C. Strikwerda, eds., Consumers Against
Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan 18401990 (Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); and Kimberley M. Grimes and L. Milgram, eds., Artisans and
Cooperatives: Developing Alternative Trade for the Global Economy (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2000). For autonomous movements in Europe, see George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of
Politics: European Autonomous Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (New York:
Humanities Press, 2007).
293
citizenship in both citizen and governance/citizen relationships is ecocentric

and human-centric (or relationship-centric in both cases). Civic activities
are oriented towards caring for the public or civic goods of the correlative
city: namely, the community and its members bound together by citizen/
governance and citizen relationships in interdependency relationships with
non-human animals and the environment they bear as inhabitants of the
natural habitat.78 Civic goods are multiplex and they too are subject to ongoing democratic negotiation. They include such democratic goods as
civicising relationships in many spheres and the character development
and conviviality that come from participation; and such substantive goods
as caring for the environment, economic self-reliance, mutual aid, fair trade,
equality among citizens and so on. When civic citizens call a particular
governance relationship into question, they do so under the general critical
ideal that it fails to realise civic goods in some specific way or another. These
are goods that make possible and enhance civic forms of life.79
(13) Gaia citizens. Civic citizens are thus caretakers of the goods of the
dwelling places in which they live. In so doing, they dissolve the modernist
distinction between culture and nature that separates civics from the places
in which it is enacted. Every locale and network of locales of civic activity is
not only culturally diverse but also a place in the natural world with its web
of relationships of biological and ecological diversity. They see the interactive and interdependent relationships between humans and nature as
similar in kind to human relationships, and they attend to and care for
them in similar ways. They listen and respond carefully to nature as a living
being (Gaia) in their ecological sciences and daily practices of treading
lightly. Civic citizens realise that this non-metaphorical field of possibilities
in human/natural relationships and its limited Spielraum is the ground of all
others. They are Gaia citizens.80
They also take their civic responsibility of caring for the goods of
communities and members in dwelling places and placeways to be prior
78
79
80
See Bowden, Caring, pp. 14182; Anderson, Recognition of Being, pp. 194229.
In his global survey of civic organisations, Paul Hawken classifies these goods into two main
categories, social justice and the environment: Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest
Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming (New York: Viking,
2007). For the contrast between egocentric and ecocentric ethics, see Chapter 3, this volume.
For a historical and interdisciplinary introduction to this ecological dimension of citizenship, see
Emilio F. Moran, People and Nature: An Introduction to Human Ecological Relations (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006). See also John Borrows, Landed Citizenship: An Indigenous Declaration of
Interdependence, in Recovering Canada; Capra, The Web of Life; James Lovelock, The Revenge of
Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity (London: Penguin,
2007); Hawken, Blessed Unrest.
294
to protecting the liberty rights of abstract individuals. They translate the

latter back into one important civic good (negative freedom), detach it from
free trade and place it among other goods that vie for attention in civic
deliberative practices. They also reply that, in many cases, what oppressed
individuals and minorities say they want is not protection from their own
communities by a tier one right enforced by a distant national or international court, but democratic empowerment in their local communities
(civic freedom). In theories of modernity, this grounded civic ethic is
discredited by redescribing it as a pre-modern stage of historical and
moral development and as a particular ethics of care in contrast to the
allegedly higher and universal theory of morality and justice for the
abstracted and independent individuals of modern citizenship. And
the public good is redescribed as the spread of modern liberties and their
underlying institutions of economic growth.81 Notwithstanding the hegemony of this egocentric world-view with the rise of Western imperialism,
multilayered ethics of civic freedom and care in human and natural relationships have been and continue to be the more basic and widely endorsed
orientation of the worlds peoples in their diverse cultures and traditions for
millennia.82 Moreover, the dawning awareness of the destruction of local
communities, environmental devastation, global warming and climate
change brought about by four centuries of expansion and exploitation
under the sway of this modernising orientation, in which these public
bads are concealed as externalities, is gradually undermining its credibility
and paramountcy. Not only environmental and climate scientists of the
world community and millions of citizens but even former modernisers and
globalisers are quietly walking away from it and coming around to see the
good of this alternative way of being a citizen in the world.83
(14) Non-violence. Civic citizens are learning to be non-violent game
players, and one of their most important civic activities today is the teaching
and practice of non-violent dispute resolution and disarmament. As we have
seen, the institutions of civil citizenship are spread and enforced by coercion. The justification for this is that people without the canonical civil
institutions are not civilised and thus are not trustworthy. It is rational to
81
82
83
As we have seen in section 3 and Chapters 1, 4, 5 and 7, this volume.

For the anthropological and interdisciplinary literature on this claim, see Moran, People and Nature.
For examples of this turn in the World Bank, see Daly and Cobb, For the Common Good; and Stiglitz,
Globalization and Its Discontents. Hawken, Blessed Unrest, dates the transitions to an ecological
orientation among civic activists in non-Indigenous North America to the influence of Thoreau
and Emerson in the mid-nineteenth century, Rachel Carsons Silent Spring in the 1960s, the environmental and social justice movements, and then climate change and global warming. In Canada one
would add the name of David Suzuki.
295
distrust and fear them in their state of lawlessness and insecurity. Only the
civilising force of institutionalised modern law and capitalism can render
them civilised, predictable and trustworthy. If they do not submit or remove
themselves, coercion can and should be used. Not surprisingly, the peoples
in their own civilisational relationships who are approached, occupied and
continuously patrolled by armed foreigners with this aggressive superior/
inferior attitude and conduct respond by fearing and distrusting them, and
trying to protect themselves and expel the uninvited and uncivicised guests.
The dynamics of fear and hatred and war preparation and war ensue (as we
surveyed in section 3).
Democratic citizens have learned from this depressing history that distrust and violence beget distrust and violence and from the history of nonviolence that there is another more powerful way that leads to peace. They
start from the simple premise that humans in all civilisations are already
familiar with proto-civic and civicising relationships, even imperialistic
westerners, and thus already able to recognise and enter into others.
Accordingly, they approach others unarmed and with the embodied attitude and comportment of openness and trustworthiness. This takes the
phenomenological form of the extended open hand, which says I trust you
and come in peace, please reciprocate in almost all cultures, in opposition
to the closed fist. Only this vulnerable yet courageous and disarming
comportment of groundless trust can initiate the reciprocal, pre-linguistic
response and begin to weave a negotiated relationship of grounded mutual
trust one strand at a time, civicising the partners as they interact, just as one
does across differences in ones own neighbourhood. Democratisation
cannot be spread by imposing institutional preconditions because nonviolent grass-roots democratic relationships are the preconditions of democratisation. Consequently, peace cannot be the end of a long historical
process of war and the spread of Western institutions. Peace is the way.84
This commitment to non-violent democratic foreign policy is simply the
extension of the non-coerced first step into civic citizenship (under aspect 3
above).85
84
85
This view, which is antithetical to modern imperial citizenship, is widely recognised in different
ethical and spiritual traditions. For example, Jean Vanier, Finding Peace (Toronto: Anansi, 2003);
Mahatma Gandhi, All Men are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections (New York: Continuum, 2005);
Hanh, Keeping the Peace; Deepak Chopra, Peace is the Way: Bringing War and Violence to an End
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005).
For the civic tradition of non-violence, see Ackerman and Duvall, A Force More Powerful; Mark
Kurlansky, Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Modern
Library, 2006); and Transcend International, Transcend: A Peace and Development Network for
Conflict Transformation by Peaceful Means, www.transcend.org.
296
(15) Domination and liberation. The final aspect of civic citizenship arises
when citizens run up against unjustifiable limits to the civic activities in
citizen/governance and citizen relationships that we have been discussing.
In any of these activities, there is always a vast ensemble of relationships that
are not open to negotiation in the course of the activities. These background
non-negotiable relationships structure and limit the foreground field of
possible actions in citizen/governance and citizen relationships. I will call
these discursive and non-discursive relationships structural relationships.
If citizens try to bring these into the space of negotiation, they are met with
refusal, often because the structural relationships are the very basis of the
unequal power and universal claim to authority of the hegemonic partners
with whom they are negotiating. When, for example, a network of citizens
negotiates with a multinational corporation over the sweat-shop conditions
under which their products are made, the multinational corporation and the
global, legal, economic and military relationships that support it remain
immovably in the background, structuring the limited and unequal field of
negotiable relationships. If citizens attempt to overcome these background
structural relationships, either by bringing them into the field of foreground
negotiations (thereby transforming them into governance and citizen/
governance relationships) or by overthrowing them entirely, as in a revolution, they move beyond negotiation to strategies of confrontation.
Confrontation strategies constitute the fourth type of civic activity introduced under aspect 6.
The problem (from a civic standpoint) is not only that there are such
background structural relationships to any local negotiation, but that, as we
saw in the first part of this chapter, on modern citizenship, local structures
are embedded in complex layers of national and imperial structural relationships of inequality, dependency and exploitation that have been built up
over a half millennium. This vast network of multilayered structuration
appears to be a world system capable of integrating the foreground play of
specific civic negotiations into its daily reproduction and expansion.86 In
many theories this is precisely what is meant by globalisation. No responsible account of civic citizenship can avoid the question of how citizens can
confront, de-imperialise and civicise this imperial leviathan, which seems
able to make playthings out of the other four types of civic activity. All of
section 5 addresses this question. However, to make the transition, I want to
86
The classic presentation of this is Immanuel Wallersteins world systems theory. See the Journal of
World Systems Research for this approach.
297
clarify the terms of structure (structural relationships) and agency (confrontation strategies) that disclose the field.
It is important to realise that all forms of civic activity take place within
background structural relationships that are not open to negotiation in the
course of the foreground negotiations. They are background enablingconditions that facilitate negotiations while foreclosing infinite regress. In
the sweat-shop example, the citizens appeal to sections of the background
transnational trade law and international law to bring the multinational to
the table. Civil citizens interpret them as the very conditions of possibility
of civic engagement and the grounds of universalisable citizenship, whereas
civic citizens interpret them as singular and contingent enabling-conditions
of a particular form of civic engagement with a history of struggles behind
them; however, they both agree on their role in civic activities. They have to
be held firm for the negotiations to take place, or, from the civic orientation,
the activity of negotiating holds them in place. Thus, it is not the structural
role of such relationships that makes them objectionable, as long as they are
open to civic questioning and negotiations under other circumstances (see
aspect 9 above). Rather, what makes structural relationships objectionable
from the civic perspective is when they do not enable civic citizens to care
for civic goods but disable them in some way. They suppress, disallow,
block, arbitrarily constrain, misrecognise, render negotiators unequal,
include and assimilate, co-opt and enable the powerful to bypass the
democratising negotiations of citizens. Structural relationships that play
these anti-democratic roles are structural relationships of domination.
The imperial relationships of inequality, dependency and exploitation are
prime examples of such domineering relationships. They are the target of
confrontation strategies.
If we focus on the classic modern revolutions against a state system of
domination as the abstract paradigm of confrontation, then there appears to
be a sharp binary distinction between negotiation and confrontation. In
confrontations, revolutionary citizens liberate themselves from a structure of domination, whereas in negotiations, reforming citizens exercise
their limited civic freedom within it. But this unsituated picture obscures
the complexity of real-world civic struggles in locales. From the situated
perspective of civic citizens engaged in concrete civic activities, confrontation strategies form a continuum from refusing to negotiate in accordance
with the rules to revolution. It is difficult to draw a sharp distinction
between negotiation and confrontation. When does a negotiating tactic
become an act of confrontation: refusal to follow an order, speaking truth to
power, walk-out, witnessing, sit-in, protest, strike, general strike, picket line,
298
road block, local or global boycott, Ghandian non-cooperation, coordinated uprising, rebellion or revolution? In each case, the citizens are refusing
to negotiate and confronting what is, from their local perspective, a structural relationship of domination. On what grounds, other than the binary
paradigm, could one say that a reforming negotiator who takes this courageous step within the negotiations is necessarily co-opted and ineffective,
whereas the citizens who refuse to enter into negotiations and organise for
the revolution from the outside are necessarily confrontational and effective? Even retrospectively, it is difficult to say which confrontation activities
precipitated an overall change or transformation.
Confrontational strategies are multiplex not only in their tactics but also
in the civic activities they initiate. Think of these examples. Citizens who
have no civil right to protest or demonstrate against harms to civil goods do
so anyway, not simply to protest monologically, but to force the powers that
be to enter into negotiations, and they see this as a success only if mutually
binding negotiations transpire. In other cases, citizens bypass protests and
simply engage in a form of civic activity even though they do not have the
civil right to do so and on the grounds that it needs to be done. Mdecins
Sans Frontires (Doctors Without Borders) is a global example of this
phenomenon of acting otherwise without a civil right but not without
civic right.87 If these sorts of confrontation turn out to be successful, the
initiatory precedents often harden into a customary or institutionalised civil
right to continue to engage in them (as in aspect 3). They are exemplars of
extending the use of citizenship by enacting it that we discussed in the
introductory section. Neither case fits the revolutionary model, yet each
may well be revolutionary in its consequences. Conversely, neither is a case
of lawlessness or anything goes, for both are undertaken for the sake of
civic goods and to bring the activity under civicising relationships. As we
saw in section 2, such confrontational precedents are often absorbed into
the civil institutions and their civic history forgotten.
Correlative with the tendency to construe confrontation solely in terms
of revolution is the tendency to view structural relationships of domination
through the paradigm of a bounded system like a state or a system of states
(as is presupposed in the use of inside and outside above). Yet, from the
civic standpoint, structural relationships of domination are neither bounded
nor systemic. The common experience of confrontations suggests otherwise. When citizens overthrow a local structural relationship or convert it
87
Mdecins sans Frontires, www.msf.org. For an analysis of this example from a civic perspective, see
Michel Foucault, Confronting Governments: Human Rights, in The Essential Works, Vol. III.
299
into a citizen/governance relationship (or a citizen relationship in cases of

cooperatising private corporations), they find a further layer of dominating
structural relationships behind it, and so have always to begin again the next
morning.88 The decisive example is the decolonisation revolutions of the
middle of the twentieth century and the de-imperialisation revolutions in
the new world order today. As we saw in section 3, citizens of the colonies
were able to overthrow structural relationships of political domination
(colonialism) by a complex repertoire of confrontation strategies, but they
found the political powers they (or their elites) acquired deeply embedded
in further layers of background imperial structural relationships of domination. The revolutionary anti-imperial struggles since the end of decolonisation have confirmed this complex situation. A successful revolution
against the local dependent elite is followed by financial boycotts, economic
pressure, tactics of destabilisation, covert and proxy military operations and,
if necessary, the overt fist of US military intervention in order to overthrow the popular government.89 The classic picture of a bounded people
overthrowing their unjust regime and setting up a new government as they
see fit within bounded states has quite limited application, yet it continues
to prevail, perhaps because it hides the unjust reality.
These examples, and others to follow, also illustrate what we saw in
section 3. The structural relationships of global domination are not only
historically layered rather than bounded but also networked rather than
systemic. What holds structural relationships of domination in place and
integrates both civic negotiations and confrontations into an on-going
global organisation is neither a functional property of a world system nor
a hidden hand, as it appears from the theoretical gaze. Rather, it is the actual
contingent exercise by humans of all the considerable means available to the
hegemonic partners in the layers of informal imperial networks that encircle
the globe. The networkisation of informal imperialism beginning in the
1970s consists in linking together the various unequal nodes (communicative, economic, financial, military, legal, educational and so on) in structural
and governance relationships that make up the network. For our purposes,
88
89

In addition to the literature referred to on this topic in Chapters 5 and 7 of this volume, see Stephen
Kinzer, Overthrow: Americas Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt,
2006); James Carroll, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
(New York: Metropolitan, 2006). For the early history of intervention, see Robert Kagan, Dangerous
Nation: Americas Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New
York: Vintage, 2007). The imperialists celebrate these overthrows. See, for example, Kaplan, Imperial
Grunts.
300
the crucial feature of this non-systemic form of organisation is that the

nodes are composed of humans networking in a variety of different forms of
association, all of which rest ultimately on the negotiated practices of the
participants in their relationships with each other.90 At the end of the day,
therefore, what keeps the imperial network going and the structural relationships of domination in their background place is nothing more (nor
less) than the activities of powerfully situated actors to resist, contain, roll
back and circumscribe the uncontainable democratising negotiations and
confrontations of civic citizens in a multiplicity of local nodes. These sites of
civic activity are the Achilles heel of informal imperialism. To see dominating relationships as a systemic structure and to organise confrontation
accordingly is to misrepresent the field of local and global citizenship and
to overlook the concrete possibilities available on it for creative and effective
negotiations and confrontations of civicisation and de-imperialisation.
With this more accurate survey of the field in hand, we are now in a
position to turn to glocal citizenship practices.
5 the glocalisation of civic and glocal
citizenship
In contrast to the two ways in which civil citizenship is spread globally
(outlined in section 3), I will now examine the two distinctive ways in which
diverse civic citizenship is spread around the world. One trend is by the
persistence and recent renaissance of local forms of civic citizenship practices despite the globalisation of modern citizenship. This localisation trend
is illustrated by means of its three distinctive aspects. The other trend is by
the global civic federation and networkisation of local diverse citizenship
practices. Three civic aspects are used to illustrate this worldwide trend. I
call this global networking glocalisation and the networkers glocal citizens
because they are grounded in and hyperextend the civic features of local
citizenship.91
I will also discuss these two ways of glocalising civic citizenship in relation
to the global crisis of citizenship we examined in section 3. To recollect, the
formal and then informal imperial spread of modern citizenship and the
underlying institutions it sends on ahead to lay the foundations of
90
91
For the networkisation of informal imperial governance see Chapter 6, this volume. See also Chapter 3
for another argument for the non-systemic character of large historical concatenations of practices.
Section 5 draws on the chapters and literature referred to in Part 2 of this volume, without repeating
the references.
301
civilisation have led in many cases, at best, to a form of global cosmopolitan

citizenship for official NGOs and multinational corporations; low-intensity
citizenship for dependent elites of the former colonies; the dispossession or
marginalisation of local citizenship and governance; the subordination of
local economies and polities to global corporations and trade regimes;
enormous inequalities; violent cycles of repression and resistance; and
increasing environmental destruction. This crisis of modernity/coloniality
has coincided with a crisis of democratic deficits in the representative
democracies of the hegemonic states. The informal imperial networks of
economic, legal, cultural, media, security and military relationships not only
bypass and undercut the diverse citizenship of billions of people who are
governed by them. They also manipulate, downsize and disregard the
representative and legal institutions of modern citizenship that are supposed
to bring them under representative authority. These trends of globalisation
constitute a crisis of global citizenship that, viewed in isolation, fosters a
pervasive sense of disempowerment and disenchantment. I want now to
move around and reinterpret them from the perspective of the six aspects of
glocal citizenship.
(1) Another world is actual. Despite these devastating trends, another
world of legal, political, ecological and even economic diversity has survived
and continues to be the loci of civic activities for millions of people. The
reason for this remarkable survival and renaissance in the post-colonial
world, unknown to the dominant debate over global citizenship, is that
Western imperialism governs through indirect or informal means and thus
depends on the active collaboration of imperialised peoples exercising constrained local self-government in their own cultural ways. Those who are
not part of the westernised elite have been able to keep their diverse
practices and forms of life alive to some extent within the considerable
Spielraum of informal dependency relationships. Another world of pluralism exists in the interstices of globalisation.92 One of the most astonishing
examples is the survival and resurgence of 250 million Indigenous peoples
with their traditions of governance and Gaia-based citizenship after five
hundred years of genocide, dispossession, marginalisation and relentless
assimilation.93 The lived experience of citizenship in the present age is
thus different from and more multiplex than it is portrayed through the
92
93
See Chapters 5 and 7, this volume; for an introduction to this historical field, see Benton, Law and
Colonial Cultures.
Mander and Tauli-Corpuz, eds., Paradigm Wars.
302
sweeping generalisations of globalisation theories of both defenders and

critics.94
Many existing diverse practices of governance have been corrupted into
exploitative and despotic relationships by their dependency on indirect rule,
and others were always non-civic.95 The point is neither to reject them
simply because they are non-modern nor to accept them uncritically
because they are different or traditional. It is rather to bring them into
comparative and critical discussions with other forms of governance and
citizenship and to explore ways in which citizens can civicise them by
speaking and acting within them.96 In the modernised West, a vast repertoire of local citizenship practices have also survived within the interstices of
state-centric modern citizenship, such as traditional working-class organisations and new and creative forms of cooperatives and networks linking
rural and urban citizens in countless ways and around various civic goods
(the environment, non-violent dispute resolution, low-cost housing, antiracism, organic farming, place-based pedagogy, neighbourhood security
and so on). These old and new citizenship practices and improvisations
are multiplying rapidly today in the return to the local of a new generation
disenchanted with the elite manipulation of representative citizenship, the
destruction of local communities by a half millennia of globalisation from
above, and moved by the ecological revolution of the last century.97
(2) Democratising democracy. The second significant aspect of glocalising
civic citizenship is the array of movements to democratise democracy we
touched on in section 4. The aim of these movements is to democratise the
legal, political and bureaucratic institutions of modern representative
democracy so that the people who are subject to them are consulted and
have an effective negotiated say within them wherever power is exercised
non-democratically and unaccountably, in ad hoc confrontations of speaking out and going public or in more formal modes of negotiation in which
94
95
96
97
Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace (Cambridge: South End Press,
2005); David McNally, Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism (Winnipeg:
Arbeiter Ring, 2006).
As we have seen in section 3, the roles of the US military and multinational corporations in countries
in Latin America and Saudi Arabia (and other petrotyrannies) are examples of how informal
imperialism (by a low-intensity civil democracy) corrupts local governments, props up the most
repressive regimes and subverts grass-roots democracy. For Latin America, see Grandin, Empires
Workshop, and for Saudi Arabia, see Robert Vitalis, Americas Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil
Frontier (San Francisco: Stanford University Press, 2007). For a general survey of the petrotyrannies
under informal imperialism, see John Bacher, Petrotyranny (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2000).
Mahmood Mamdani, Beyond Settler and Natives as Political Identities: Overcoming the Legacy of
Colonialism, Comparative Studies in Society and History 43(4), 2001: 65164.
Colin Hines, Localization: A Global Manifesto (London: Earthscan, 2000).
303
those who govern must listen and give an account. These are thus movements to civicise the civil institutions of modern citizenship. Here civic
citizens join hands with civil citizens engaged in the same projects from
within such as proportional representation, deliberative democracy, democratic constitutionalism, legal and political pluralism, and civic versus civil
security. Globally, they include the movements to democratise the institutions of global governance and to establish at the UN an effective democratic forum that represents the majority of the peoples of the world who are
subject to the relationships of inequality, dependency and exploitation.98
(3) Post-colonial civics. Since decolonisation and the triumph of informal
imperialism, millions of the worlds poor have been forced to migrate from
the colonised world to the imperial countries to find work in a closely
controlled global labour market.99 Despite the hardships of poverty, slavery,
exploitation, racism, xenophobia and second-class or non-citizenship, they
refuse to be servile subjects. Instead, they exercise their civic citizenship in
new and untoward ways, negotiating their diverse cultural ways into the
public and private institutions of modern citizenship. This journey back or
boomerang effect of formerly colonised peoples now civicising the imperial
countries challenges the dominant imperial, nationalist and racist cultures
encoded in modern citizenship institutions and creates new forms of multiculturalism and multi-civilisationalism on the ground, both in the urban
centres and the diasporic relationships (transnational civicscapes) they
sustain with their former countries. These grass-roots multicultural communities in mongrel cities generate new kinds of citizen relationships of
conviviality among their members and supportive local civic citizens groups
that are often overlooked by, or poorly integrated into, the official policies
of respect for diversity.100
The three aspects of this multifaceted trend are reviving and transforming
practices of local civic citizenship. These worldwide local sources and resources of civic citizenship are much stronger and more resilient than we think.
They are the bases of glocal citizenship. NGOs, social movements, networks, informal civic federations and similar creative improvisations are the
98
99
100
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed., Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon
(London: Verso, 2005); Ian Loader and Neil Walker, Civilizing Security (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007); Archibugi, Held and Khler, eds., Re-imagining Political Community; and
Chapters 2 and 4, this volume. Bronislaw Malinowski called for the democratisation of the UN at its
inception and predicted the imperial and violent consequences of the control of the great powers, in
Freedom and Civilization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1944), pp. 116.
Richmond, Global Apartheid.
Leonine Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the Twenty-First Century (London:
Continuum, 2003); and Chapter 8, this volume.
304
means by which glocal citizens link together and so glocalise these local civic
bases. These networks are civic and glocal to the extent that they (i) are
grounded in and accountable to the local civic nodes, and (ii) hyperextend
civic relationships (citizen and citizen/governance) and other civic aspects in
their own organisation and their relationships with others. Of course not all
networks are composed of citizen and citizen/governance partnerships.
Many are institutional and governmental in form. They mobilise rather
than civicise. However, the network mode of organisation has the flexibility
and potential to be organised civically and democratically all the way down.
This mode of being-with is within its field of possibilities.101 If, in contrast,
networkers are organised institutionally and/or governmentally, and if they
see themselves as the bearers of the gifts of civilisation and modern citizenship to the less developed, then they are modern (civil and cosmopolitan)
imperial networks.102 In addition to providing mutual learning and aid
to their member civic nodes, glocal networks also crucially provide the
civic means of democratising the persisting global imperial relationships
of inequality, exploitation and dependency that are the major cause of
the crisis of global citizenship. There are three major aspects of this
glocal networking trend that are slowly but surely de-imperialising and
democratising the predominant imperial relationships, and these are outlined
in (4) to (6).
(4) Glocal negotiating networks. As we have seen in section 3, the persisting
economic, legal, political, debt, media, educational and military relationships of informal imperialism are so unequal that, although the elites within
the former colonies are able to have a say and negotiate (in global governance institutions and elsewhere), they (the G120) are barely able to modify
these governance relationships, let alone transform them into governance/
citizen relationships, and they are in turn scarcely in civicised relationships
with their own people (the majority of the worlds population). Similarly,
the hegemonic partners in the relationships the great powers and their
multinational corporations are not held democratically accountable by
their own citizens. Even where there are well-defined international laws and
rights, the more powerful bypass or manipulate them to their advantage so
they function as a legitimating faade rather than an effective guarantee.103
Since the only guarantee of democratic rights is the concrete exercise of civic
101
102
103

Ayers, Demystifying Democratization; Tony Evans and Alison Ayers, In the Service of Power: The
Global Political Economy of Citizenship and Human Rights, Citizenship Studies 10(3), 2006: 289308.
See Chapter 4, this volume. This is also the conclusion of Micheline Ishay, The History of Human
Rights, and she recommends glocal citizenship networks as the most effective response (pp. 3489).
305
freedom, the initial role of a glocal network is to link together glocally

enough local citizenship practices governed by any of these unequal relationships to single the relationship out and contest it. The networked
citizens then call the existence and privacy of the unequal relationship
into the space of public questioning and put enough soft power pressure
on the responsible powers that be to bring them to negotiations in the most
effective place or places. It is thus the glocalisation of the whole practice of
civic negotiation and confrontation vis--vis unequal global governance
relationships outlined in section 4.
Networked contestation, negotiation and confrontation can take place
anywhere and by anybody in the relationships (for example, in sweat shops
and/or consumer boycott of sweat-shop products, in the WTO or in protest
against the WTO). It should not be the burden of the wretched of the earth
to refuse to submit and act otherwise, as in the dominant theories of
resistance, but of the most powerful and privileged to refuse to comply
and engage in the work of glocal citizenship. In doing this, citizens in glocal
networks are engaged in civicising and democratising these imperial relationships by bringing them under the shared authority of all those subject to
them in their local places and ways. They can steer the negotiations into the
civil, legal and political institutions of the most effective nation-state or of
global civil society, or they can negotiate directly in civic society, or they can
pursue both strategies at once. If the negotiations take hold, the subaltern
partner ceases to be dependent but also does not become independent (as
was imagined in the unsuccessful theories of decolonisation). Rather, the
partners gradually become interdependent on the on-going democratic
relationships between them (as we encountered in the local examples in
section 4, aspect 7). These innumerable practices of glocal negotiation and
confrontation constitute one non-violent path of de-imperialisation and
democratisation characteristic of the civic tradition.104
(5) Glocal cooperatives. The second aspect of glocal networking that
works to transform imperial relationships into democratic ones is the spread
of cooperative citizen partnerships between partners in the North and
global South. These cooperative informal federations are not strategies of
contestation and negotiation, but of directly acting otherwise; of creating
non-violent civic relationships between partners in the North and global
104
This is also the view of Vandana Shiva, The Greening of Global Reach, in The Geopolitics Reader,
eds. Simon Daly and P. Routledge (London: Routledge, 1998); and Andrew Dobson, States,
Citizens and the Environment, in States and Citizens.
See Iris Marion Young, Global Challenges: War, Self-Determination and Responsibility for Justice
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), especially pp. 1379; and Chapter 4, this volume.
306
South. The relationships among all the partners in the network, and within
each partners local community association, are worked out civically and
democratically as they go along. That is, they often build on the local
cooperatives of section 4, aspect 11. Although there are thousands of
examples, perhaps the best known are glocal cooperative fair trade and
self-reliance relationships, such as the specific Fair Trade and Level Ground
cases, in contrast to competitive free trade; glocal networks of non-violent
dispute resolution in contrast to war, militarisation and securitisation; and
deep ecology networks in contrast to (oxymoronic) sustainable development.105 Like their local cooperative partners, these glocal cooperative
citizens work within the Spielraum of existing global rules in each case,
yet they play a completely different game with different goods. They create
and live another world in their civic and glocal activities.106
The World Social Forum has emerged as an important place where
citizens engaged in civic and glocal activities can meet each year. It is to
glocal citizenship what the World Economic Forum is to modern citizenship. The forum does not take a position but, rather, provides a civic space
in which participants from diverse citizenship practices can enter into civic
dialogues of translation, comparison, criticism, reciprocal learning and
further networking. They share the knowledge of their different arts of
citizenship with each other without granting modern citizenship the universal and superior status it claims for itself and on the presumption that
each mode of citizenship is partial and incomplete, so each can learn its
limitations from others. The forum also hopes to develop closer links of
reciprocal learning between academic research and the practices of citizenship we have been discussing, perhaps setting up popular universities of the
social movements for this purpose.107
(6) Civic research. Relationships of reciprocal elucidation between academic research and civic activists, of which the popular universities are only
one example, bring into being yet another kind of glocal partnership. These
are glocal pedagogical partnerships that aim to challenge the institutional
separation between university education and its fields of study that is
105
106
107
For fair trade and mutual aid as the antidote to free trade, see Dunkley, Free Trade. For examples see
For a global survey see Hawken, Blessed Unrest, and his website of civicising networks around the
world at www.wiserearth.org; Grimes and Milgram, eds., Artisans and Cooperatives; and Chapter 8,
this volume. For the primary importance of building webs of nurturing relationships among local
ecologies, food producers, food consumers and waste recyclers, see Moran, People and Nature.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond
(London: Zed Books, 2006); Janet Conway, Citizenship in a Time of Empire: The World Social
Forum as a New Public Space, Citizenship Studies 8(4), 2004: 36781.
307
characteristic of the modern university.108 They also challenge the current

privatisation and globalisation of this institutional model of the university.
Glocal pedagogical relationships aim to bring university learners, teachers
and researchers into a more practical and mutually edifying relationship
with the activists and activities studied, as well as to encourage universities
to become good responsible civic citizens of their own locales, sharing their
knowledges with local communities and becoming exemplary glocal citizens. This is a civicising revolution in the way we think of and practise
higher education in relation to public affairs.109
These revolutionary trends of the twenty-first century illustrate one of
the most fundamental practical advantages of a civic/glocal orientation.
Many if not most of the global harms to public goods we have discussed,
from inequality, exploitation and war to climate change and global warming
caused by imperial competition over scarce resources, cross the jurisdictional boundaries of the institutions of civil and cosmopolitan citizenship.
There is thus a series of disempowering disjunctures between the agents
who cause the harms and the people who are affected by them, for the
agents responsible are often not subject to the jurisdiction of the civil
institutions in which those affected have the status of civil citizens.110 This
is a critical problem of civil citizenship organised within nation-states and an
international law system of formally equal yet substantively unequal and
dependent nation-states. It can be addressed within the civil tradition only
by the establishment of something like a world state or its negative surrogate
(an alliance of powerful states) to enforce the empire of rules of modern
cosmopolitan citizenship and its underlying institutions. Yet, as we have
seen, this further and perhaps ultimate projection of this imperial model
would bring with it all the preconditions of the global harms in the first
place.111 The civic tradition simply does not have this disenfranchising
disjuncture problem. By starting from the premise that any community
subject to and affected by a relationship of governance that harms a public
108
109
110
111
This particular institutional separation of university education is part of the more general modern
trend discussed in section 4, aspect 9.
Michael R. MGonigle and Justine Stark, Planet U: Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University
(Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2006); and Volume I, Chapter 1, for this pedagogical
relationship between academic research teams and civic citizens.
David Held introduced this disjuncture problem (see Chapter 2, this volume).
For my objections to various plans to extend the imperial project, see Chapters 5, 7, and 8, this
volume. For another example, see G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World of
Liberty Under Law: US National Security in the 21st Century: The Princeton Project on National
Security (Princeton: Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton
University, 2006).
308
good is for that very reason a citizenry with the civic right to hold the
responsible party accountable through civic negotiations, it links democratic organisation, networkisation and civicised institutionalisation directly
to the specific power relationship at issue and at the most effective sites.
conclusion: exemplars
If all the millions of examples of civic and glocal citizenship practices could
be taken in a single view, as the tradition of modern citizenship and
globalisation presents its inexorable progress, perhaps this would help to
dissipate the sense of disempowerment and disenchantment the present
crisis induces. But, from the situated standpoint of diverse citizenship, this
cannot be done and the attempt would overlook the very diversity that the
civic approach aims to disclose, keep in view, learn from and work with.
Civic empowerment and enchantment do not come from grand narratives
of universal progress but from praxis actual participation in civic activities
with others where we become the citizens we can be. But this response raises
the question of the motive for participation in the first place. The civic
answer has always been the motivating force of examples of civic activities
and exemplars of civic citizenship. Since the civic tradition has no place for
the cult of great leaders and leadership but only for citizens linking arms and
working together in partnerships, it turns once again to everyday practice
for these motivating stories.
Fortunately today there are over 1 million examples of civic and glocal
networks and cooperatives and millions of exemplary ordinary citizens from
all walks of life in all locales that move potential citizens of all ages to
participate. They arguably make up the largest non-centralised and diverse
coalition of movements in the world.112 But perhaps an illustrative exemplar
for our dark times of the kind of glocal citizenship I have sketched is
Mahatma Gandhi and his lifelong activities to rid the world of imperialism.
His ordinary, civic and glocal life continues to move millions of people to
begin to act. The reason for this, I believe, is the simplicity of the four
citizenship practices his life of Satyagraha manifests.113
The first is active non-cooperation vis--vis any imperial (non-civic) relationship and its corresponding idea of one universal civilisation or cosmopolitanism for all. The second is the way of peace. For Gandhi this consists in
civic organisation and uncompromising non-violent confrontation and
112
113
Hawken, Blessed Unrest, makes this argument.

For Gandhis life and influence, see Weber, Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor.
309
negotiation with those responsible for imperial relationships with the aim of
converting them to non-violent, democratic and peaceful relationships.
Thirdly, for these two activities to be effective they have to be grounded
in the local field and practices of the alternative world you want to bring
about. For Gandhi this consists of constructive work in local, self-reliant,
civically organised Indian villages and respectful participation in their ways.
Like millions of glocal journeyers, Gandhi started from and returned home
to the close and closest things after a sojourn in the transcendent world of
modern citizenship, seeing these homespun activities in a new and enchanting light. Where have I been? one often exclaims at this moment of insight
and transformation into a citizen who sees, thinks and acts glocally.114
Fourthly, the first three practices are integrated into a singular style of
civic life by the more personal practices of self-awareness and self-formation.115
For Gandhi these arts and exercises constitute a spiritual relationship to
oneself in ones relationships with others and the environing natural and
spiritual worlds.116 This is a meditative relationship of working truthfully on
oneself and ones attitude to improve how one conducts oneself in the
challenging yet rewarding civic relationships with others. These are daily
practices of becoming an exemplary citizen.
114
115
116
A moving rendition of such a journey of self-discovery, which walks us through many of the steps of
this chapter, was written by Nietzsche in Nice in the summer of 1886 when he was composing the
life-affirming fifth book of the Gay Science. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface 1886, in Human, All too
Human. For an analysis of experiences of transformation from subject to active citizen, see Norval,
Aversive Democracy.
For the place of practices of the self see section 4.
Similar practices are available in every culture. See David Fontana, The Meditators Handbook: A
Complete Guide to Eastern and Western Meditation Techniques (London: Thorsons, 1992).
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Index to Volume II
9/11 see September 11th
civil liberties 2502

of the ancients 252
of minorities 2545
of the moderns 251
social and economic 254
civilisation 281
standard of 21214, 259, 2612, 263
colonialism 1314, 21315, 25960
internal colonisation 118, 259
legacy of 139
and modern citizenship 247, 248
see also imperialism
communication
and imperialism 1689
and networks 170
communicative action 186
democratic 169, 18894
Conant, Charles A. 1323
confrontation 297
consensus 87, 111, 117
Constant, Benjamin 1516, 55
The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with
that of the Moderns 11920
constituent powers 2002
constitutional democracy 197216
paradox of 197
see also constitutionalism
constitutionalism 4, 338, 402, 91, 196221
democratic 4, 5, 40, 21721
formality condition of 1989, 286, 28890
imperialism, and 21017
modern 198216, 24950
principle of 634, 92100
see also constitutional democracy
cooperatives 220, 235, 2912
co-originality thesis 207
cosmopolitanism 2579
see also democracy (cosmopolitan)
cosmopolitan right 2579
see also Kant
critical attitude 3, 1519, 249
Aboriginal peoples see Indigenous peoples

acting differently 4, 208, 219, 269, 280, 292, 298
agonistics 82, 967, 11011, 2768
Alfred, Taiaiake 678
Alliance of Civilisations 234
another world 219, 2356, 292, 3012, 306
assimilation 11619
and networks 1768
audi alteram partem 85, 110, 229
belonging 119
Berlin Conference (1885) 214
Bush, George H. W. 1678
Bush, George W. 134
Butler, Smedley (Major-General) 1545
Callinicos, Alex 142
Cambridge school 5
Canada
and identity 61
Canadian Constitution, Charter of Rights and
Freedoms 167
capitalism 8990, 204, 2512
and networkisation 1723
Capra, Fritjof 74, 76
Castells, Manuel 61, 69, 170, 1723, 187, 241
Chomsky, Noam 114
citizen relationships 2902
citizenship 3, 243309
arts of 281
citizenisation 99100, 119
civic 2467, 2714, 2813
cosmopolitan 2467, 256, 257
global 2437, 25667
glocal 7, 243, 2467, 248
see also diverse citizenship; modern
citizenship
civic practices 26970
civil disobedience 256
351
352
Index to Volume II
critical reflection 1878, 2489

cultural hermeneutics 389
culture
billiard-ball view of 289
conceptions of 2431
cultural pluralism 279
Dean, Mitchell 65, 81
Debord, Guy 173
decolonisation 6, 213, 1535, 1956
formal 1278, 1312, 133, 13940, 159, 202,
21516, 257, 2623, 299
see also de-imperialisation
de-imperialisation 21721, 243, 304
see also decolonisation
deliberation 106, 107, 11618
see also dialogue
democracy 9, 505, 90, 91, 188, 215, 226, 264, 281,
291, 3023
agonistic 230
cosmopolitan 6, 63, 734, 107
deliberative 745, 107, 122, 230
extensive 6570
living 220
low-intensity 1568, 2289
open-ended 22930, 238
principle of 634, 77, 82, 92100
representative 545, 602, 1023, 108, 11113,
1801, 2012, 2523, 2889
social democracy 66, 234, 254, 265
struggles for 513
democratic deficit 1023
Derrida, concept of culture 29
devolution 1012
Dewey, John 115
dialogue 4, 3842, 838, 10913, 230, 239
see also deliberation
discourse ethics 151
dispute resolution 689, 2878
diverse citizenship 8, 2469, 267, 268309
aspects of 269
Doctors Without Borders (Mdecins Sans
Frontires) 298
domination 64, 297
Dreyfus, Hubert 57
ecological ethics see ethics
Enlightenment, the 1819, 109
environmental movements 6, 702, 828
see also ethics
equality 315, 412
impartial 334
ethics, ecological 73, 759, 85, 8890,
2934
Euripides, The Phoenician Women 282
Europe 7
cultural integration in 2314
economic policy in 2346
foreign policy in 236
and imperialism 19, 22
integration in 225
Kantian idea of 1519, 26
and making of modern citizenship 2556
European Monitoring Centre on Racism and
Xenophobia 227
European Union 225
referendums on European constitution 233
exclusion 11415
fair trade 306
Falk, Richard 112
Fanon, Frantz 140
The Wretched of the Earth 213
federalism 358
see also Kant
First Nations see Indigenous peoples
Flusty, Steven 191
Fontana, Biancamaria, The Idea of Europe 1517
Foucault, Michel 5, 18, 158
approach of 456
conception of freedom 567, 812
games of truth 88
on government 56
objections to Habermas 78
practical systems 52, 7982
practices of government 489
France, civil unrest in 233
freedom 5, 8, 9, 68, 72, 812, 106, 1601, 253
civic 3, 4, 6, 7, 2768
democratic 21721
network 1823, 190
practices of 11213, 1201
Fukuyama, Francis 150
Gallagher, John 1956
Gandhi 8, 239, 3089
Gilroy, Paul 233
Gleeson, Brendan 75, 76
global governance 6, 5960, 823, 101, 131, 1413,
181, 1956, 205, 21416, 2378, 257, 263
approaches to 624
and democracy 101
global inequalities 2656
globalisation 6, 7, 101, 1045, 1501, 220,
25667, 296
from below 11213
language of 2436
and networks 1914
political globalisation 47, 4950, 5860, 98
Index to Volume II
glocalisation 3003
governance
and networks 1835
relations of 34, 2749
see also government
government 558
see also governance; practices of
government
governmentality 81, 2067
Habermas, Jrgen 924
critique of Kant 3940
and democracy 1067
and ecological ethics 745, 778
and global governance 138
Hardt, Michael 173, 1834
Hegel, G. W. F.
Preface to The Philosophy of Right 434
young Hegelians 45
hegemon/subaltern relations 15961
Held, David 137
cosmopolitan democracy 734
globalisation 49, 589
Herder, Johann 149
Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of
Mankind 278
historical development theories 8, 16, 247,
14550, 2089
see also universal theories
historical studies 3, 4, 87
Hobson, John A. 211
identity, and culture 301
identity politics see recognition
immaterial labour 173
imperial right 21011
imperialism 67, 8, 58, 12765, 2378
and capitalism 204
and communication networks 176
critics of 12930
cultural 204, 27
European 19
of free trade 1956, 258
indirect colonial rule 21112, 25960
informal 6, 13243, 151, 153, 1612, 168, 196, 212,
2601
interactive 159, 196
language of 1434
of modern citizenship 207, 28990
of modern constitutionalism 200
new imperialism 1289
replication 140, 211
two wings of 1347
United States, and 1289, 1327, 1412, 1678
see also colonialism
353
Indigenous peoples 5, 153, 301

of the Americas 219
concept of constituent powers 201
and ecological relations 867
internal colonisation 356
and self-determination 3
and self-government 118
treaty relationships 290
westernised elites 13940, 215, 260, 262
international law 6, 7, 1356, 1401, 156, 199200,
21216, 2378, 261, 264, 265
international relations 6
Internet, the 170
interstitial locations of freedom 113
Iroquois Confederacy 37
irresolution thesis 208, 218
jazz music 9
and improvisation 910
Johnson, Chalmers 154
Joint Vision 2020 137
juridical containment thesis 207, 218
juridical subject 2501
Jyllands-Posten cartoon controversy 232
Kant, Immanuel 1449, 154
asocial sociability 256
cosmopolitan right 16, 146
and democracy 55
and imperialism 27
Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Intent 247, 145
idea of Europe 1519, 26
Perpetual Peace 1718, 1920, 21, 247, 1449
republican constitutions 16, 213
warfare 1456
What is Enlightenment? 18
world federation of free states 6, 1618, 19, 144
Kantianism 1542
neo-Kantianism 14952, 1567
Kelly, Kevin 171
Klein, Naomi 179
Korsgard, Christine 30
Koskenniemi, Martti 136, 152
Kroker, Arthur 177
Kymlicka, Will 24, 34
Laden, Anthony 31, 41
Latin America, and imperialism 133
Latour, Bruno 241
League of Nations, Mandate System 262
Liberalism, difference-blind 32, 41
Locke, John 56, 205
Loughlin, Martin 1978, 2078
Low, Nicholas 75, 76
354
Index to Volume II
MGonigle, Michael 86
Mair, Peter 241
Marshall, Chief Justice John 36
Marx, Karl 65
migration 303
militaryindustrial complex 2045
Mill, John Stuart 334
modern citizenship 8, 24668, 292
globalisation of 25667
language of 2436
rights of 2505
Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 196
Monroe doctrine 133, 154, 260
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat 205
Morgenthau, Hans 152
multiculturalism 226, 230, 2314, 2545
multinationalism 5, 226, 230, 2314
multinational corporations see transnational
corporations
mutual respect 301
Naess, Arne 73, 85
nation-states 275
negotiations see dialogue
Negri, Antonio 173, 1834
neo-liberalism 1045, 2345
networks 7, 69, 112, 168, 241
assimilation, and 1768
democratisation 3046
and exclusion 175
and freedom 1823, 185, 190
and imperialism 176, 299300
network governance 1835
network subjectivity 175, 1768
and security 1823
social ordering 1725
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Daybreak 467
The Means to Real Peace 23940
non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) 257
non-violence 2945, 308
Owen, David 67
Pagden, Anthony, The Idea of Europe 1517
Pocock, John, The Idea of Europe 1517
political philosophy 89, 1089
two approaches to 437
post-colonialism 20, 158
practical discourses see discourse ethics
practical systems 7982
practice-based philosophy 90, 1089, 201
practices of freedom see freedom
practices of governance 489, 645

dispersion of 4952
see also governance
public philosophy 35, 711, 1203, 2401
exemplars of 8
radical critics of 1011
public sphere 284
Rawls, John 924, 107
and ecological ethics 745
self-respect 31
reasonable disagreement 956, 11011
recognition 56, 23, 678, 22631
Reid, Bill 46
relations of governance see governance
Robinson, Ronald 1956
Rorty, Richard 9
Rosell, Steven 69
Royal Commission on Aboriginal
Peoples 5
rule-following 2301, 2857
rules as rails 231
Said, Edward 1921
contrapuntal ensembles 29
Culture and Imperialism 158
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 178, 219
Schatzki, Theodore 89
Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State 240
self-creation thesis 208
self-determination 15960, 215, 251, 273
as an imperial language 1528
self-government
and cultural diversity 345
separation thesis 1989, 286, 28890,
September 11th 169, 173, 236, 265
Simpson, Gerry 136
Skinner, Quentin 202
Slaughter, Anne-Marie 157
Smith, Neil 1412
solidarity see belonging
sovereignty 2023
Spielraum 277
spiritual practices 309
Strange Multiplicity 4
structural relationships 296
subjects/subjectivisation 66
and networks 175, 1768
Supreme Court of Canada, Reference re the
Secession of Quebec (1998) 978
Swan, Peter 237
Taylor, Charles 23, 323, 74
and cultural pluralism 28
intercultural dialogue 389
Index to Volume II
Third Way 104
transnational corporations 115,
17980
Trudeau, Pierre Elliot, civic ethos 1667,
18990
trust 21819, 239, 2945
United Nations, Universal Declaration of
Human Rights 114
United States, The 22
federation of 1718
and imperialism 1289, 1327, 1412, 1535,
1678, 212, 2601
military 136, 170, 263
National Security Strategy of the United States
of America (2002) 135
Open Door policy 133
universal theories 8, 1489, 248, 2701

normativity 9
see also historical development theories
Von Bernstorff, Jochen 179, 186
Walker, Neil 2078, 238
War on Terror 225
Weiner, Antje 187, 231
Westphalian system 131, 140
Wilson, Woodrow 1534
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 5, 46, 2445
World Social Forum 1934, 306
Young, Iris Marion 42, 117
Zapatistas 291
355
ideas in context
Edited by
quentin skinner and james tully
1 r i c h a r d r or t y , j . b . s c hn eew i n d a n d
q u en t i n sk i n n e r (eds.)
Philosophy in History
Essays in the historiography of philosophy
pb 978 0 521 27330 5
2 j. g. a. po co ck
Virtue, Commerce and History
Essays on political thought and history, chiefly
in the eighteenth century
pb 978 0 521 27660 3
3 m. m. goldsmith
Private Vices, Public Benefits
Bernard Mandevilles social and political thought
hb 978 0 521 30036 0
4 a n t h on y p a g de n (ed.)
The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe
pb 978 0 521 38666 1
5 d a v i d su m m e r s
The Judgment of Sense
Renaissance nationalism and the rise of aesthetics
pb 978 0 521 38631 9
6 la ur e n c e d i c k e y
Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, 1770 1807
pb 978 0 521 38912 9
7 ma r g o t o dd
Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order
pb 978 0 521 89228 5
8 ly nn su m i da j o y
Gassendi the Atomist
Advocate of history in an age of science
pb 978 0 521 52239 7
9 e dm u n d l e i t es (ed.)
Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe
pb 978 0 521 52020 1
10 w o l f l e p e n i e s
Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology
pb 978 0 521 33810 3
11 t e r e n c e b a l l , j a m e s f a r r a n d r u s s e ll l . h a n s o n (eds.)
Political Innovation and Conceptual Change
pb 978 0 521 35978 8
12 g e r d g i g er e n z e r et al.
The Empire of Chance
How probability changed science and everyday life
pb 978 0 521 39838 1
13 pet er novi ck
That Noble Dream
The objectivity question and the American historical profession
hb 978 0 521 34328 2 pb: 978 0 521 35745 6
14 d a v i d l i e b e r m a n
The Province of Legislation Determined
Legal theory in eighteenth-century Britain
pb 978 0 521 52854 2
15 d a n i e l p i c k
Faces of Degeneration
A European disorder, c.1848 c.1918
pb 978 0 521 45753 8
16 k ei t h b a k er
Inventing the French Revolution
Essays on French political culture in the eighteenth century
pb 978 0 521 38578 7
17 i a n h a c k i n g
The Taming of Chance
hb 978 0 521 38014 0 pb 978 0 521 38884 9
18 g is e l a b o c k , qu e n t in s k in n e r a n d
m a u r i z i o v i r o l i (eds.)
Machiavelli and Republicanism
pb 978 0 521 43589 5
19 d or o t h y r o ss
The Origins of American Social Science
pb 978 0 521 42836 1
20 k l a u s ch r i s t i a n k o h n k e
The Rise of Neo Kantianism
German academic philosophy between idealism and positivism
hb 978 0 521 37336 4
21 ia n m acle an
Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance
The case of law
hb 978 0 521 41546 0 pb 978 0 521 02027 5
22 ma ur izi o vir ol i
From Politics to Reason of State
The acquisition and transformation of the language of politics 1250 1600
hb 978 0 521 41493 7 pb 978 0 521 67343 3
23 m a r t i n v a n g e l d e re n
The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555 1590
hb 978 0 521 39204 4 pb 978 0 521 89163 9
24 n i c h o l a s p h i l l i p s o n a n d qu e n t i n s k i n n e r (eds.)
Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain
hb 978 0 521 39242 6
25 ja me s t u l l y
An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts
hb 978 0 521 43060 9 pb 978 0 521 43638 0
26 r i ch a r d t uc k
Philosophy and Government 1572 1651
pb 978 0 521 43885 8
27 r i c h a r d r . y e o
Defining Science
William Whewell, natural knowledge and public debate in
early Victorian Britain
hb 978 0 521 43182 8 pb 978 0 521 54116 9
28 m a r t i n w a r n k e
The Court Artist
The ancestry of the modern artist
hb 978 0 521 36375 4
29 pe t er n. mi l l er
Defining the Common Good
Empire, religion and philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain
hb 978 0 521 44259 6 pb 978 0 521 61712 3
30 c h ri st o ph e r j . b e r ry
The Idea of Luxury
A conceptual and historical investigation
pb 978 0 521 46691 2
31 e . j . h u n d e r t
The Enlightenments Fable
Bernard Mandeville and the discovery of society
hb 978 0 521 46082 8 pb 978 0 521 61942 4
32 ju l i a s t ap le t on
Englishness and the Study of Politics
The social and political thought of Ernest Barker
hb 978 0 521 46125 2 pb 978 0 521 02444 0
33 k ei t h t r i b e
Strategies of Economic Order
German economic discourse, 1750 1950
hb 978 0 521 46291 4 pb 978 0 521 61943 1
34 sa ch ik o k us u kaw a
The Transformation of Natural Philosophy
The case of Philip Melancthon
hb 978 0 521 47347 7 pb 978 0 521 03046 5
35 d a v i d a r m i t a g e , a rm a n d h i m y a n d
que ntin s ki nne r (eds.)
Milton and Republicanism
hb 978 521 55178 6 pb 978 0 521 64648 2
36 m a r k k u p e lt o n e n
Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English
Political Thought 1570 1640
hb 978 0 521 49695 7 pb 978 0 521 61716 1
37 p h i l i p i ro n s i d e
The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell
The development of an aristocratic liberalism
hb 978 0 521 47383 5 pb 978 0 521 02476 1
38 n a n c y c a r t w r i g h t , j o r d i c a t , l o l a f l e c k
a n d t h o m a s e . u eb e l
Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics
hb 978 0 521 45174 1
39 d o n a l d w i n c h
Riches and Poverty
An intellectual history of political economy in Britain, 1750 1834
pb 978 0 521 55920 1
40 j e n n i f e r p l a t t
A History of Sociological Research Methods in America
hb 978 0 521 44173 5 pb 978 0 521 64649 9
41 k n ud ha a k o n s s e n (ed.)
Enlightenment and Religion
Rational dissent in eighteenth-century Britain
hb 978 0 521 56060 3 pb 978 0 521 02987 2
42 g . e . r . l l o y d
Adversaries and Authorities
Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese science
hb 978 0 521 55331 5 pb 978 0 521 55695 8
43 r o l f l i n d n e r
The Reportage of Urban Culture
Robert Park and the Chicago School
hb 978 0 521 44052 3 pb 978 0 521 02653 6
44 a n n ab e l b r e t t
Liberty, Right and Nature
Individual rights in later scholastic thought
hb 978 0 521 56239 3 pb 978 0 521 54340 8
45 s t e w a r t j . b r o w n (ed.)
William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire
hb 978 0 521 57083 1
46 h e l e n a r o s e n b l a t t
Rousseau and Geneva
From the first discourse to the social contract, 1749 1762
hb 978 0 521 57004 6 pb 978 0 521 03395 4
47 d av i d r u nc i m an
Pluralism and the Personality of the State
hb 978 0 521 55191 5 pb 978 0 521 02263 7
48 a n n a b e l p a t t e r s o n
Early Modern Liberalism
hb 978 0 521 59260 4 pb 978 0 521 02631 4
49 da vi d w e i nstein
Equal Freedom and Utility
Herbert Spencers liberal utilitarianism
hb 978 0 521 62264 6 pb 978 0 521 02686 4
50 y u n l e e t o o an d n i a l l li v i n g s t on e (eds.)
Pedagogy and Power
Rhetorics of classical learning
hb 978 0 521 59435 6 pb 978 0 521 03801 0
51 r e v i e l n e t z
The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics
A study in cognitive history
hb 978 0 521 62279 0 pb 978 0 521 54120 6
52 m a r y m o r g a n a n d ma rg ar e t m o r r i s o n (eds.)
Models as Mediators
hb 978 0 521 65097 7 pb 978 0 521 65571 2
53 j o e l m i c h e l l
Measurement in Psychology
A critical history of a methodological concept
hb 978 0 521 62120 5 pb 978 0 521 02151 7
54 r i ch a rd a. p r i mu s
The American Language of Rights
hb 978 0 521 65250 6 pb 978 0 521 61621 8
55 r o b e r t a l un jo n e s
The Development of Durkheims Social Realism
hb 978 0 521 65045 8 pb 978 0 521 02210 1
56 ann e m c l a r e n
Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I
Queen and Commonwealth 1558 1585
hb 978 0 521 65144 8 pb 978 0 521 02483 9
57 j a m e s ha n k i n s (ed.)
Renaissance Civic Humanism
Reappraisals and reflections
hb 978 0 521 78090 2 pb 978 0 521 54807 6
58 t . j . h o ch s t ra ss e r
Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment
hb 978 0 521 66193 5 pb 978 0 521 02787 8
59 d a v i d ar m i t a g e
The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
hb 978 0 521 59081 5 pb 978 0 521 78978 3
60 i a n hu n t e r
Rival Enlightenments
Civil and metaphysical philosophy in early modern Germany
hb 978 0 521 79265 3 pb 978 0 521 02549 2
61 da r i o ca s t i g l i o n e a n d i a i n h a m ps h er m o n k (eds.)
The History of Political Thought in National Context
hb 978 0 521 78234 0
62 i an ma cl ea n
Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance
The case of learned medicine
hb 978 0 521 80648 0
63 p e t e r m a c k
Elizabethan Rhetoric
Theory and practice
hb 978 0 521 81292 4 pb 978 0 521 02099 2
64 g e o f f r e y l l o y d
The Ambitions of Curiosity
Understanding the world in Ancient Greece and China
hb 978 0 521 81542 0 pb 978 0 521 89461 6
65 ma rkku pe lton en
The Duel in Early Modern England
Civility, politeness and honour
hb 978 0 521 82062 2 pb 978 0 521 02520 1
66 a d a m s u t c l i f f e
Judaism and Enlightenment
hb 978 0 521 82015 8 pb 978 0 521 67232 0
67 a n d r e w f i t z m a u r i c e
Humanism and America
An intellectual history of English colonisation, 1500 1625
hb 978 0 521 82225 1
68 p i e r r e f o rc e
Self Interest before Adam Smith
A genealogy of economic science
hb 978 0 521 83060 7 pb 978 0 521 03619 1
69 e ri c n e ls o n
The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought
hb 978 0 521 83545 9 pb 978 0 521 02428 0
70 h a r r o h o p f l
Jesuit Political Thought
The Society of Jesus and the state, c. 1540 1640
hb 978 0 521 83779 8
71 mik ae l h o rn qvis t
Machiavelli and Empire
hb 978 0 521 83945 7
72 d a v i d c o l c l o u g h
Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England
hb 978 0 521 84748 3
73 j o hn r o b e r t s o n
The Case for the Enlightenment
Scotland and Naples 1680 1760
hb 978 0 521 84787 2 pb 978 0 521 03572 9
74 d a n i e l c a r e y
Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson
Contesting diversity in the Enlightenment and beyond
hb 978 0 521 84502 1
75 a la n c ro m ar t i e
The Constitutionalist Revolution
An essay on the history of England, 1450 1642
hb 978 0 521 78269 2
76 h a n n a h da w s o n
Locke, Language and Early Modern Philosophy
hb 978 0 521 85271 5
77 co n al c on dr en , s t ep he n g a u k ro g e r
a n d i a n h u n t e r (eds.)
The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe
The nature of a contested identity
hb 978 0 521 86646 0
78 a ng u s g o wl an d
The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy
Robert Burton in context
hb 978 0 521 86768 9
79 p e t e r s t a c e y
Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince
hb 978 0 521 86989 8
80 r h o d r i le w i s
Language, Mind and Nature
Artificial languages in England from Bacon to Locke
hb 978 0 521 87475 0
81 d av i d l e op ol d
The Young Karl Marx
German philosophy, modern politics, and human flourishing
hb 978 0 521 87477 9
82 j o n pa r k i n
Taming the Leviathan
The reception of the political and religious ideas of Thomas
Hobbes in England 1640 1700
hb 978 0 521 87735 0
83 d . w e i ns t ei n
Utilitarianism and the New Liberalism
hb 978 0 521 87528 8
84 l u c y d e l a p
The Feminist Avant Garde
Transatlantic encounters of the early twentieth century
hb 978 0 521 87651 3
85 b o r i s w i s e m a n
Lvi Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics
hb 978 0 521 87529 5
86 d u nc an b el l (ed.)
Victorian Visions of Global Order
Empire and international relations in nineteenth-century political thought
hb 978 0 521 88292 7
87 i a n h u n t e r
The Secularisation of the Confessional State
The political thought of Christian Thomasius
hb 978 0 521 88055 8
88 c h ri st i a n j . em d e n
Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History
hb 978 0 521 88056 5
89 a n n e l i e n d e d i j n
French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville
Liberty in a levelled society?
hb 978 0 521 87788 6
90 p e t e r g a r n s e y
Thinking About Property
From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution
hb 978 0 521 87677 3 pb 978 0 521 70023 8
91 p en el op e d eu t s ch er
The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir
Ambiguity, conversion, resistance
hb 978 0 521 88520 1
92 h e l e n a r o s e n b la t t
Liberal Values
Benjamin Constant and the politics of religion
hb 978 0 521 89825 6
93 j a m e s t u ll y
Volume I: Democracy and Civic Freedom
hb 978 0 521 44961 8 pb 978 0 521 72879 9
94 j a m e s t u l ly
hb 978 0 521 44966 3 pb 978 0 521 72880 5

Public Philosophy in A New Key

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PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy

Public philosophy and civic freedom: a guide

global governance and practices

1 The Kantian idea of Europe: critical and cosmopolitan

2 Democracy and globalisation: a defeasible sketch

3 An ecological ethics for the present

4 The unfreedom of the moderns in comparison to their ideals of

5 On law, democracy and imperialism

Communication and imperialism

7 The imperial roles of modern constitutional democracy

civic freedom contra imperialism

A new kind of Europe? Democratic integration in the

On local and global citizenship: an apprenticeship manual

Public philosophy and civic freedom: a guide

app roa ching practice

Public philosophy as a critical activity

Situated creatively: Wittgenstein and political philosophy

To think and act differently: comparing critical ethos and

The agonistic freedom of citizens

Reimagining belonging in diverse societies

Multinational democracies: an introductory sketch

7 The negotiation of reconciliation

8 The struggles of Indigenous peoples for and of freedom

9 A new field of democracy and civic freedom

University Press for guiding it through the publication process. Finally, I am

Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge

Public philosophy and civic freedom: a guide

Public Philosophy in a New Key is a new approach to the study of politics.

A guide to Public Philosophy in a New Key

theory-building approach. Chapters 2 and 3 provide the groundwork of

any form of association. This modest democratic approach has a much

A guide to Public Philosophy in a New Key

I will provide a brief synopsis at the outset to give a preliminary indication of

A guide to Public Philosophy in a New Key

freedom of a public philosopher. I see the studies in these volumes as

A guide to Public Philosophy in a New Key

Global governance and

The Kantian idea of Europe: critical

See especially Volume I, Chapter 9.

Global governance and practices of freedom

A critique of the Kantian idea of Europe

dispossession of Indigenous and other non-European peoples. Kants sketch

Global governance and practices of freedom

non-Indigenous liberal revolutions in Latin America and, to some degree,

A critique of the Kantian idea of Europe

characterises this attitude or ethos is, in what is given to us as universal,

Although Perpetual Peace played an important role in promoting a form of

Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, in The Politics of Truth, pp. 1245.

Global governance and practices of freedom

to the possibility of the continuity of underlying forms of economic and

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

A critique of the Kantian idea of Europe

impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain

The new urgency to understand the imperial horizons of European texts

Global governance and practices of freedom