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Globality, State and SocietyAnna Yeatmana

a Anna Yeatman, Canada Research Chair Department of PoliticalScience, University of Alberta, H.M. Tory Building, Edmonton,Alberta T6C 1C2, Canada.Published online: 12 Mar 2014.

To cite this article: Anna Yeatman (2003) Globality, State and Society, Citizenship Studies, 7:3,275-290, DOI: 10.1080/1362102032000098878

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Citizenship Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2003 9" Carlax Publishing ----------------------- '"'' T"""'U""'""'-

Globality, State and Society1

ANNA YEATMAN

Globality denotes the development of society on a universal scale. Society is no longer contained by the nation state and social solidarity in the Durkheimian sense becomes global rather than national. This development intensifies the ethical challenge of modernity: the development of a cosmopolitan conception of the human subject. This paper asks what this ethical challenge demands both of us as individual citizens and of the states to which we belong. A cosmopolitan conception of the human subject is one that abstracts from group-based differences of identity in specifying what it is to be a person. Whether people get to be persons depends on the action of the state in providing a constitutional framework of right. It depends also on individuals becoming both willing and able to be self-determining persons who can recognise their fellows as persons. The development of a cosmopolitan conception of right is hindered by profound ambivalence about the modern project of self-determination and the demands it makes of us. It is hindered also by the lack of a secular account of the human subject and by conceptions of human rights that follow upon an onto-theological conception of the human subject. These are anti-statist in orientation and share this in common with laissez-faire economic globalism. Cosmopolitan right depends on both persons and states understanding what it would mean to re-conceive the res publica such that states are oriented as public authorities within a constitutionally governed interstate order.

Introduction

Globality is the tenn used by Ulrich Beck (2000) to denote the way social relationships and interdependencies are increasingly organised on a global scale. Beck rightly distinguishes between globality and globalism, the latter tenn referring to the laissez-faire pattern of organisation of a global market economy. Where globalism is a way of using the state to institute the market economy in a way that is antagonistic to the use of the state on behalf of right and human welfare, there is nothing inherent in globality that is antagonistic to the state. The real question about globality is what kind of state and interstate order is able to work positively with it.

In this paper I explore what this ethical challenge demands both of us as individual citizens and of the states to which we belong. I argue that this

Anna Yeatman. Canada Research Chair, Department c~f Political Science, University of Alberta, H.M. Tory Building. Edmonton, Alberta T6C IC2, Canada.

ISSN 1362-1025 Prim; 1469-3593 Onlinc/03/030275-16 © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOl: 10.1080/13621 02032<XXJ098878

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challenge requires us to understand that the subject of a cosmopolitan ethic is a self-determining subject. Self-determination is a matter of achievement for an individual. It cannot occur without the individual developing the capacity for thought, a capacity that locates agency or subjectivity inside the individual subject (Levine, 2002, p. 50). Self-determination is possible only within the institutional framework of agency that a constitutional state supplies. The constitutional state is an organised centre of thought about the institutional conditions for individual self-determination, and accordingly, the constitutional state depends on the capacity for thought in just the same way that the individual's capacity to determine him or herself does.

Globality does not represent a new ethical challenge for it is the nature of modernity to ask that we enter into a self-determining and thoughtful relation­ship to our social existence rather than accept it as something that is given to us by virtue of our belonging to a particular culture. Globality, however, intensifies the ethical challenge of modernity, and thereby also intensifies the ambivalence and resistance that the ethical challenge of modernity incites. The ambivalence concerns whether we are willing to enter into a thoughtful relationship to our social existence, a relationship that requires us to give up the idea that our identity and our obligations are already given to us in a particular cultural world of belonging, and to open ourselves to the kind of subjective development that is involved in learning what it means to be a self-determining person who is capable of respecting others as self-determining persons. Resistance to the ethical challenge of modernity can arise out of such ambivalence. It can arise also out of a misreading of modernity as a project of Western civilisation where, on the one hand, nation states that inherit the mantle of Western civilisation corrupt the ideas of the self-determining person and the constitutional state by viewing them as the expression of a particular culturally based virtue, and, in consequence, see themselves as justified in maintaining Western domination of the interstate system. The resistance of these states to the universalism of a cosmopolitan ethic both elicits and is self-justifying with regard to the tendency of non-Western states to regard the rights of the person and constitutional democracy as culturally inappropriate because of their historical origins in the West.

Human rights are the contemporary expression for what Kant ( 1970) called cosmopolitan right. Human rights refer to a universal conception of the status of the person: the human being as a self-determining individual. Human rights do not transcend the state. On the contrary: for an effective worldly presence they depend on the state as a constitutional state. If a global interstate order is to do what is possible to secure human rights it will be one that promotes the constitutional state and that assists its member states in becoming effective constitutional states. A constitutional state depends on a positive valuation of the state as the public authority that acts to secure the public interest of individuals in their shared status of being self-determining persons. On this argument, then, human rights depend on the further development of the idea of the constitutional state.

Neither the idea of the person nor the idea of the constitutional state is an idea specific to any culture-it is in the nature of these ideas to break out of the grip

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of culture and group-based identity. They are public because they are universal, and their effect is to make the claim of any particular culture on who people are and what they should do a private rather than a public claim, a matter for faith rather than a matter for thought. This point has been easier to appreciate in relation to the idea of the modem constitutional state than in relation to the idea of the person. The former idea is associated with a rich tradition of reasoning about the constitutional state, for instance, the accounts of the constitutional state to be found in the work of Locke, Kant, or Habermas. However, the idea of the person as a reasoned conception of what it means to be a self-determining individual is still inadequately elaborated. Instead of the proposition that the subject of human rights is the person, a proposition that requires there to be accounts of what it is to be a person and of how individuals acquire the capabilities to act as a person, we find the essentially religious belief that the subject of human rights is the human being as given in the nature of things, or as god made him or her. This is an onto-theological conception of the human subject. Such a conception suggests that the subject of cosmopolitan right does not have to be thought about, but is instead a matter of faith and of commitment to faith.

Inevitably such a conception of human rights smuggles into the idea of what it is to be a human being a particular cultural version of the identity of this subject. For instance, natural right is the Western version of a belief in human rights, and it grounds the conception of the human subject as the subject of right in the human being as a Christian god creates him or her. In the face of Western belief in human rights, it is entirely understandable that an Islamic (or Confucian or Buddhist) alternative conception of right is offered. There can be no adjudication of a common ground between competing belief systems-they must remain in competition for the ground of human rights. Common ground can be found only if belief is given up in favour of thought, and it is accepted that culture is irrelevant to the question of the status of the person and a universal or global order of right.

The Ethical Challenge of Modernity: Social Being as Universal Being

Modernity refers to the development of society on a universal scale. Globality refers to the integration of people and societies in a global system of interdepen­dencies. Globality thus realises or intensifies the trajectory of modernity, and those who say that in this respect globality simply continues an established dynamic of modernity are correct. The patterns of independency between the social units comprising human beings become universal in scope connecting human actors across both time and space. Durkheim ( 1964, p. 257) put it thus: 'Social life, instead of being concentrated in a multitude of little centres, distinctive and alike, is generalized'. Increasing 'dynamic or moral density', as Durkheim calls it, between people changes how they think of themselves. They develop an abstract and universal conception of the nature of the social bond. In turn they develop an abstract conception of the human subject as a subject of right. A sociality that connects human subjects in a universal way is one that abstracts from group-based differences, and it signifies a conception of the social

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bond as residing in a common humanity. Just what this means, and how it can be of practical value, depends on us moving beyond a metaphysical conception of the human being/species to one that can be thought about.

It is on this point that confusion is rife. David Levine (2002, p. 47) outlines two very different possibilities for interpretation of the idea that we share a common humanity:

First, we can consider human a natural category that refers to qualities of a species .... The alternative is to consider the univer­sal category to which the term human alludes a status attained by, or conferred on, those who are human by merit of a specific development and depending on their taking on a specific position in society. To distinguish this usage, we can refer to this attain­ment as personhood. Being a person, unlike being human, entails a special status vis-a-vis others who are persons, a status secured in its recognition by others ...

Before I explain further what is at stake in choosing which of these interpreta­tions to follow, it is important to understand that most contemporary adherents of human rights think that human rights attaches to the human subject by dint of this subject's natural status as a human being. Vaclav Havel, for example. is amongst the many Western adherents of human rights who see them as given in what Christians call natural right, the status of the human being as god has made him or her. Here is Havel ( 1999, p. 6):

I have often asked myself why human beings have any rights at all. I always come to the conclusion that human rights, human freedoms, and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world. These values are as powerful as they are because, under certain circumstances, people accept them without compulsion and are willing to die for them, and they make sense only in the perspective of the infinite and the eternal. I am deeply convinced that what we do, whether it be in harmony with our conscience, the ambassador of eternity, or in conflict with it, can only finally be assessed in a dimension that lies beyond the world we can see around us.

Human rights are left in thrall to the private domain of the individual conscience. Such grounding as they have is either ineffable or specified in terms of a particular tradition of belief. This is a poor basis for a cosmopolitan idea of right.

Nothing in the conception of the human being as a natural being explains why it is we would regard each individual as a subject of right or a person. Human beings can be and have been enslaved, oppressed and dominated. Levine (2002, p. 47) clarifies this point:

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To speak of domination, or enslavement, or exploitation, we must have a notion of the deprivation of right. But to enslave a human does not make him any less a member of the species to which the term human refers.

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If the human being is a subject of right on a non-discriminatory basis, that is, regardless of differences of age, sex, marital status, sexuality, religious faith, cultural and ethnic origins, it is because the human being is constituted as a person. How does such constitution occur? It occurs through first the specification of the status of the person. Such specification is made by means of reasoned argumentation in a universe of discourse where there is discussion and debate from different points of view about what is conceptually and practically entailed in the status of the person at this time. This is the universe that is oriented to what Benhabib (1992) calls 'communicative ethics'. She terms this a postconventional morality because it brackets all conceptions of justice and the good that are justified with reference to 'our way of life', and requires all such claims to be justified within an inclusive and reflexive conversation about which conceptions are adequate to the universality of the global social bond and a non-discriminatory idea of the person. As Benhabib ( 1992, p. 44, emphasis in the original) puts it: 'Communicative ethics therefore is not "morally neutral", in that it maintains that only certain moral positions are comprehensive and reflexive enough such as to be able to generate norms of coexistence and conduct which would be acceptable to all in a modem society'.

The status of the person depends not just on its discursive specification, but this has to be instituted in law that is given force and authority by the state. When the state institutes the status of the person in a way that is adequate to the postconventional morality of communicative ethics, this is a state that is oriented to cosmopolitan right both within its own borders and those of the international community of the interstate system.

When human rights are seen as derived from human nature they have a primordial authority in relation to that of the state. The authority of the state is acceptable only as it expresses the original and natural order of right. Not only does this conception of the state radically discount the conceptual and practical dependency of the rights of the person on the work of the state, but, because the state owes its being to human artifice, it is seen as a very inadequate and imperfect imitation of the original. Havel ( 1999) expresses the logic of this conception thus:

I'm talking about ... the fact that there exists something of higher value than the state. That value is humanity. As we know, the state exists to serve people, not the other way around.

He concludes: 'while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God'.

Here human rights are espoused in a way that is antagonistic to the state. This conception of human rights shares with 'globalism', Beck's (2000, p. 9) term for the conception of a global market economy as a laissez-faire one, 2 the idea that society should be organised so that it expresses what it is in our nature to do. Both the humanist idea of human rights, and the idea of the self-regulating market economy, naturalise the sphere of civil society as the sphere within which human nature is free to express itself. State action is legitimate only as it helps to secure civil society.

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An actual state may or may not respect the rights of the person (human rights). The point is that when the rights of the person are respected it is because of the work of the state, and a state cannot do such work on behalf of the rights of the person without being constituted as a constitutional state. A constitutional state is one that makes the idea of the person the foundation of the rule of law. This is a state that is constituted as the public authority (Locke's term in his Second Treatise of Government): such a state makes and administers law for all persons within its jurisdiction in an impartial and non-discriminatory way. A consti­tutional state also does what is necessary to support and facilitate the develop­ment of individuals as self-determining persons who are able to recognise their fellows as persons.

The development of the individual as a person is a possibility, the actualisa­tion of which depends on how the individual is positioned in the social world. If the individual lives in a constitutional state, then the individual is able to enjoy the status of the person, a status that is recognised and upheld in law. The individual's personhood does not stop there. It depends on two further conditions that are also dependent on what Hannah Arendt called 'the world of human affairs'. The first of these concerns how the state and the family work together in facilitating the development of the individual as someone who is capable of engaging in a self-determining relationship to his or her life, and also of recognising his/her fellows as persons. The second of these conditions concerns the willingness of individuals themselves to continue to grow and develop as self-determining beings, a process that is never over and that constantly poses new challenges for those who undertake it. There are no guarantees about any of this happening. It is the nature of a postconventional as distinct from a customary social life to depend on the thoughtful agency of human beings. Their institutional life no less than their own private sphere of action is contingent on such agency. Such is the nature of the freedom that modernity makes possible.

Pathologies of Modernity

A cosmopolitan ethic of modernity demands an orientation to a reflexive and communicative rationality that is open-ended in its acceptance that new chal­lenges will be posed for it. In this sense it is progressive, but there is nothing that guarantees the progressive realisation of a cosmopolitan ethic of modernity. The rhetorical development and practice of a cosmopolitan ethics are fiercely contested sites of struggle. In fact it is the nature of the demands of a cosmopolitan ethics of recognition of the person to incite both resistance and ambivalence. We can borrow Durkheim's idea of pathologies of modernity to refer to such resistance and ambivalence without subscribing to his evolutionist conception of modernity.

Durkheim (1964, p. 353) proposed: 'Though normally the division of labor [he means the development of social interdependencies on a universal scale] produces social solidarity, it sometimes happens that it has different, and even contrary results'. When we look at what he means by pathological forms of the division of labour, we find that they arise from two causes, and each of these can

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be see as a form of resistance to the demands of a cosmopolitan conception of the person as the subject of right.

The first type of a pathology of modernity arises when, instead of those who are interdependent (Durkheim thought of employers and employees) cooperating in order to make their interdependency operate smoothly, the stronger party refuses to cooperate with the weaker party, and, in this way, uses force to supplant cooperation. The second type arises when inherited social advantage displaces merit, when instead of careers being open to talent, or social advance­ment being accessible on an equitable basis, those who inherit wealth and privilege block those who lack such an inheritance. In both these cases of a pathological distortion of the division of labour in society, those who benefit from established historical patterns of inequality organise to resist the develop­ment of an ethics that fits the development of social life on a universal scale.

Pathological forms of the division of labour in society can distort and hinder awareness of the demands of a universal ethics of personhood, but they are not the only source of difficulty for the development of such an ethics. The other source of difficulty arises out of ambivalence with regard to modernity itself. This is an ambivalence with regard to what it is that modernity demands of us as individuals free to shape our lives and thus responsible for so doing.

The promise of modernity resides in the opening up of a freedom to do not as our ancestors or tradition prescribe but to act in ways that enable us to creatively discover and invent our ways of life (Levine, 200 I, p. 34 ). To be free means that we are free to live our life as an individual, that is, one who is free to explore and develop his/her own subjective experience. Levine suggests that to be free is to be free to engage in creative living. He (2001, p. 32) explains what he means using a phrase of Erik Erikson: 'Freedom is the unrestricted potential to exploit "opportunities yet undetermined", and it is the particular way of life that results from the exploitation of those opportunities'. Referring (Levine, 2000, p. 32) to Marx and Engels in the passage in The Communist Manifesto that speaks of the destructive impact of modernity on tradition and traditional society-the passage that contains those evocative phrases 'all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned' -Levine emphasises the truth of their insight into the antagonism between group-based existence and freedom. Levine's (200 I, p. 33) way of putting this is worth citing:

The act of imagining something different changes the meaning of what is, which is to say the meaning of cultural experience and the dominance of culture over ways of life. To be able to imagine oneself in a different setting corrodes the claim to universality of the culture within which we live so far as that culture dictates specific, concretely determined ways of life. The presence of alternatives turns all putatively universal beliefs, customs, and virtues, into the expressions of particular experience. This trans­formation means the weakening, and ultimately the destruction of the hold of culture over ways of life. The commitment of culture to control ways of life-modes of interaction and attachment; the meaning of human experience; appropriate beliefs about self,

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other, and the surrounding world; and so on-must be under­mined when imagining other ways of life becomes a possibility.

To be free to pursue life as an individual who is a centre of initiative requires two things: (a) we have to be free of the claims of group identity, that is, to be free to constitute our own identity or sense of self; and (b) we must have both the capability and the willingness to assume the freedom and the responsibility of determining our 'conduct in accordance not with external rules and expecta­tions, but inner judgment' (Levine, 200 I, p. 49). To determine our choices and conduct in terms of inner judgement is a complex developmental task that takes a good deal of work and integrity on the part of the individual to achieve (for some of the most significant post-Freudian psychoanalytic insight into the nature of this task, see: Symington, 1996; Hinshelwood, 1997). We can evade this task by making others 'responsible for our conduct' (Levine, 2001, p. 49) as we do when we embrace a conception of morality that positions us in a relationship of conformity to what we understand to be 'our' way of life. As long as the individual short-circuits the possibility of coming to know him/herself, and of taking responsibility for his or her conduct, the individual can evade the challenge of developing a subjective life.

Developing a subjective life, understood in this way, means also the develop­ment of an ability to recognise and respect reality. Among other things, this ability means coming to terms with limits-both the limits of our subjective powers, and the limits of our being. This is an historically new task. Freedom does not mean the absence of limits-this would be to wish reality itself away. Freedom means the capacity to work creatively and responsibly with reality.

Ambivalence with regard to modernity is an inevitable accompaniment to the creativity and activism unleashed by the dynamics of modernity. Such ambiv­alence is complex because it has two components that get mixed up together in different ways. These are both (a) our nostalgia for established ways of thinking and doing that the latest wave of modernity has uprooted and (b) our resistance to the demands of living our lives as free beings responsible for our conduct.3

Let me draw the threads of my argument together. Modernity poses the double ethical challenge for us of, first, conceiving our shared humanity in an inclusive and universal way, and, second, taking up the opportunity and the responsibility of freedom. It is little wonder that the project of modernity understood in ethical terms is both contested and resisted. In this sense the project of modernity will never be 'finished'.

The opening up of opportunities to live a life that is not dictated by tradition has been developed to an unparalleled degree at this time. The dynamics of modernity invade now all instances of human society and this represents an intensification of the ethical challenge of modernity. When Marx and Engels say, 'All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned', they go onto conclude 'and men [human beings] at last are forced to face with sober senses the real condition of their lives and their relations with their fellow men' (cited in Berman, 1999, p. 106). It is in our time when we are faced with a practical ethical challenge of developing a cosmopolitan ethics that these words ring with a prophetic cadence.

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The State as the Organised Centre of Social Life and Organ of Social Thought

The idea of the state is often conftated with the idea of the nation and this makes it difficult to think about what is a state as distinct from a nation. There is a conception of the state that views it as the expression of a pre-existing national community. On this communitarian view of the state, its role is to express and secure this national community understood as something that is given. On this conception, the nature of the state is in thrall to 'our' way of life, to belief rather than thought, and it cannot be responsive to the demands of a cosmopolitan ethics. In order to develop an idea of the state, the national community that any particular state bounds has to be thought of as constituted through the historical and conventional work of the state, thus making it in principle responsive to new standards of inclusion and justice (see Yeatman, 1994, Chapter 6).

Durkheim' s ( 1992) conception of the state as the organised centre of society is an important idea of the state. The state represents the capacity of a society to deliberate and think about what action is needed to secure the integrity of social life. This idea of the state helps us think about how it is that the state is the constitutive site of the public business of policy deliberation and action. The state is also the constitutive site of the public as all stakeholders, including individual citizen members of a particular state, who have a legitimate stake in policy. If we have an idea of the state, then we can think about what kind of institution building and ethical understanding is necessary for the development of the state.

There is a close connection between the state as the organ of social thought and what it is that individuals do when they take up the challenge of free­dom. Both types of agency involve thought. It is by means of his/her capacity to think that the individual subject is emancipated from the grip of tradition, and is able to explore his/her opportunities for creative living. A public capability for thought through the agency of the state depends on there being available to it individuals who can think about the demands of creative living both for themselves as private individuals and for the public that they belong to.

When society is organised as a state, it means that the members of society have to re-conceive what it is that connects them. This can no longer be a customary bond such as kinship or a shared cultural identity. In becoming fellow citizens, members of a society have to enter into the work of the state as the organ of social thought, and, specifically. to be open to reflection about what the status of citizen means and what it demands of them. People get to be citizens only if the sociality that they share is structured by statehood. Thus the constitution of the state is also the production of citizenship as the nature of the social bond.

The development of modem social life on a cosmopolitan scale requires that the state and citizenship be thought about in terms that make them adequately responsive to an ethic of cosmopolitanism. For this to occur, the idea of the state must no longer be conftated with the idea of the nation.

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The Difference between First Modernity (National) and Second Modernity (Postnational) Orientations to Citizenship

Let us consider Beck's distinction between the first and second modernities. The first modernity is the development of a universal sociality that is expressed in the constitutional status of the citizen but where society is thought of in container terms, as contained in the nuclear units of families that are them­selves contained within the nation, and where the state is constructed as the exclusive and sovereign jurisdiction of the nation state. The second modernity signals the overturning of the container conception of society and of the idea of the nation state as a sovereign state that, in relation to other sovereign states, has no right to interfere with their right over their own subjects nor they with its. Such an orientation in international law to the principle of non-interference is seen by many as the hallmark of the Westphalian order of states (see Glen Johnson and Symonides, 1998; Linklater, 1998). For human rights to gain a foothold in international law, national sovereignty has to become conditional in nature (see Taylor, 1999) and to be located within a multilateral order of a shared commitment to the constitutional principles of the rule of law.

Jose Lindgren Alves (2000, p. 478) makes the point that the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 'subverted the rules of the Westphalian system of international relations, in which sovereign states were the only actors, by conferring upon the human person the status of a subject of law beyond domestic jurisdiction' (for elaboration, see Yeatman, 2000, pp 1502-5). Human rights as a universal ethical bond represent a cosmopolitan dimension of national citizen­ship. If national citizenship is to be ethical in a global world, it must be publicly accountable within an international discourse of human rights.

Human rights make explicit the universalism that is latent within the develop­ment of the modern nation state. As an entity that transcends particular loyalties of faith, estate or class, locality, and lineage, the nation represents a universalis­tic sociality. The construction of the nation is simultaneously the freeing of individuals from the bonds of local provincialism and the constitution of them on an equal basis as citizens of the state. While in the first instance national citizenship is limited to those who can show that they are self-governing because they are heads of households, the constitutional idea of a shared citizenship status calls into being movements on behalf of those who seek accession to the modern status of an individual who, sharing this status with all other individuals, is equal in this regard.

The contours of modern citizenship as it developed in relation to the first modernity-a constitutional state that establishes the civil and political rights of its citizens, and a welfare state that establishes the social rights of its citizens­are well understood in an extensive literature about the development of the institutions of national citizenship. T.H. Marshall's historical schema remains powerful because, as Linklater ( 1998, p. 187) proposes, 'what remains valid in Marshall's account is the argument that the original claims for citizenship in the eighteenth century provoked demands for a more comprehensive understanding of what it means to be a full member of a political community'.

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The second modernity is distinguished as an era from the first precisely because the major struggles to universalise citizenship are no longer only those of citizenship as an 'internalist' or domestic project but implicate also the claims of aliens in relation to those who enjoy national citizenship rights, as well as issues of inequality understood not as national but as global issues. While the nature of the universalistic idea of citizenship is such as to subject the practice of citizenship at any particular stage to developmental pressures, Linklater ( 1998, p. 188) is right to insist that this does not mean that there is any automatic evolution of citizenship rights. They are contested all the way. Nevertheless, the development of the ideal of citizenship is of consequence, and this is the reason why the development of the idea of human rights as a cosmopolitan dimension of citizenship is of such significance. Once a cosmopolitan and transnational idea of right has come onto the historical agenda, it can be resisted, and distorted by self-interested interpretation on the part of both nation states and non-state actors, but it cannot be dislodged. The primary line of tension, contradiction, if not outright fracture, within the contemporary 'language of citizenship' will concern whether and how national citizen rights are to be aligned with and made accountable to human rights.

Those who find themselves positioned as the privileged inheritors of national citizenship rights associated with the achievements of the first modernity share an interest in resisting the development of the ethical universalism of human rights. First modernity states are likely to resist this development in order to hold onto their historically established privilege as the first among equals in a global interstate order. The first modernity is associated with the interstate order of modern Western civilisation in a colonialist-extractive relationship to the rest of the world. To the extent that the Western interstate order attempts to hold onto the privilege of being the civilisation that led the first modernity, the discourse of modern citizenship that has been established in the Western interstate order is contaminated by the unethical particularism of a struggle to hold onto a privileged relationship to the freedoms of modernity at the expense of those who cannot establish membership of this interstate order.

The category mistake of equating modernity with the West (and 'Westernisa­tion') because modernity originated in the West makes it possible for both Western and non-Western states to evade the ethical universalism that the generalisation of social life on global scale demands. While the Western interstate order can substitute a culturally inflected discourse of citizenship for a universal and dialogically established conception of human rights, non­Western states are able to refer to human rights as a 'Westernising', neo-colonial discourse that their citizenries should resist. Such resistance to ethical universal­ism is allied with the weakening of the idea of a constitutional state that was one of the great achievements of the first modernity. An exclusionary nationalism goes hand in hand with an anti-constitutional populism.

If human rights are to provide a basis for rethinking citizenship and the state, a sentimental internationalism has to cede place to a reasoned account of the relationship between citizenship, the nation state, and the transnational discourse of human rights. It is striking how difficult the development of such an account seems to be. Part of the reason for this lies in an unwillingness to acknowledge

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the achievements of the first modernity as foundations on which a second modernity can build.

Globality as the Universal Extension of Statehood

In the postcolonial era of the period of the 1950s to the 1980s, the state form of social organisation has been extended to virtually all the world's people. Globality so understood means that the organisation of the social bond in terms of shared membership of a state has become universal. For when this occurs, social life is not only organised in terms of states; it is also organised in terms of an interstate order that all these states have in common.

When people are integrated into states, a struggle for citizenship on a universal basis becomes possible. This struggle has the two faces of the state, namely: (a) a struggle for the development and extension of citizenship on an inclusive and equitable basis within the nation state; and (b) a struggle for the development and extension of national citizenship on an inclusive and equitable basis within the interstate order.

The problem with first modernity citizenship is that citizenship is associated with the idea of membership of an ethnic community: one is either born into the national community or adopted into it, and the distribution of national citizen privilege is inherently antagonistic to ethical universalism. The effect of which is to build a fundamental contradiction into the citizenship rhetoric of the first modernity: we are attached to the rights of man, or in contemporary parlance, to human rights, but only for our own nationals.

When the political theorists of the constitutional state conceived the political community they did not have to think about the issue of reconciling the ethical universalism of citizenship with the ethnic particularism of a national com­munity. They conceived the state as a community of citizens, what Locke called a 'political society, and Kant (1970) called a 'constitutional republic'. As Linklater ( 1998, p. 191) puts it: 'Their supposition that national citizenship concretised universal human rights ... was necessarily at odds with totalising projects which threaten to restrict membership of the moral community to insiders'.

The classical theorists of the modern state could avoid the problem because popular nationalism came into being only at the point at which the constitutional state acquired its modern democratic representative form: when the institution of manhood suffrage disestablished the hierarchy of hereditary estates on which early modern constitutional thought is predicated. When citizenship became conflated with national identity (for an excellent historical account, see Carr, 1945), there is an inevitable slippage of normative attachment away from the constitutional state in the direction of attachment to the nation. There is a parallel slippage from constitutionalism to populism. Democracy in the sense of the populist principle of rule by the people, as Kant ( 1970, pp. I 00-1) insists, tends to be hostile to anything that represents limits on the popular will: these would include both constitutionalism and internationalism. It is antagonistic specifically, to the rule of law, and to that aspect of the rule of law that is associated with a public accounting for particular state decisions or actions that

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can be critically assessed within a communicative process of thoughtful deliber­ation shared by the national citizen public and other legitimate stakeholders.

The ethnic exclusionism of the citizenship of the first modernity is associated with the colonial era of Western civilisation. The development of the interstate order of the second modernity, where the world's people are organised into independent states, means a growing legitimation crisis for the continuing dominance of first modernity states within the interstate system.

This crisis has produced a second-order reactive exclusionism on the part of the first modernity states, one where they have organised their policy in relation to new second modernity states in terms of protecting their historic privileges and power. They have done so in two ways. First, they have constituted themselves as a 'gated community' by developing a shared policy regime that establishes what Michael Humphrey (n.d., p. 5) calls a 'transnational border between the haves and the have nots based on the reassertion of sovereignty and national identity'. They have done this in response to growing pressure from immigration out of conflict zones within new states that reflect the spread of what Mary Kaldor (200 I, p. 119) calls ' "new" or "post-modem" wars especially in Africa and eastern Europe':

These are wars that have evolved out of the guerrilla and counter-insurgency wars of an earlier period ... They are wars in which direct fighting between the contestants is rare and most violence is directed against civilians. Indeed techniques, such as population displacement, and various atrocities which directly violate both the laws of war and human rights are central to the strategies of these wars. (Kaldor, 200 I, p. 119)

Humphrey (n.d.) argues that what I am calling the first modernity states have forcefully reasserted the sovereignist (Kaldor's term) orientation of the West­phalian era of statehood in such a way that they have used the privilege of border protection to trump such commitments to human rights under United Nations treaty law as they have made. Border protection policy is now a necessary feature of electoral appeal for the politicians of these states. It makes a strong distinction between citizens and aliens, and it associates aliens as asylum seekers with 'people smugglers' in order both to stigmatise and criminalise them. To the extent that a transnational border protection policy is adopted by the first modernity states, and substituted for their commitment to maintaining a multi­lateral institutional order oriented to human rights, these states are engaged in what Peter Marris ( 1996) calls a competitive approach to the management of the politics of uncertainty, an approach that is bound to deepen international distrust, uncertainty, and terror. A competitive rather than cooperative approach to the management of relationships between globally interdependent actors fits Durkheim's category of pathological forms of the division of labour in society.

Were first modernity states to adopt a cooperative approach to governing globality, they would develop the multilateral institutions of governance so that they contribute positively to the building of 'effective state capacity in poor countries that are currently unable to deliver on any of the basic protections of their people that such theorists as Hobbes associated with the establishment of

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the sovereign state of the Westphalian era' (Yeatman, 2003, p. 19). The building of effective state capacity has also to encompass what Marshall called social citizenship because of the contribution it makes to the development of individu­als as self-determining persons. Finally, the multilateral institutions of gover­nance need to be reformed so that they operate in accordance with the principles of modern democratic constitutionalism and champion these principles in relation to all states (see Stiglitz, 2002).

There is much at stake, then, in clarifying the distinction between the state as a republican constitution and the state as the expression of the private interest of a particular people. In the era of globality, an ethical state is a political community that is committed to a republican constitution not just for itself but for all states both as separate states and as constituent units of the interstate order.

The Importance of Thought about the Human Subject as the Subject of Right

Communitarian (mis)conceptions of the citizen community derive their force from the idea that a commitment to building a citizen project with others depends on a feeling of identification with these others. Instead a commitment to citizenship depends on the capacity to think about the nature of right, as Hegel put it. Right refers to a constitutional framework for the practice of citizenship. The practice of citizenship refers to what it makes possible, both by way of enabling conditions, and individual capabilities, for individuals to orient as self-determining persons and to be able to respect others as both separate and thus different from themselves, as their own centres of initiative.

The constitutional specification and implementation of right constitutes the field of action that we call the state. It depends on two kinds of agency: (a) the public agency of the state and (b) the agency of individuals who are committed to learning what it is to be and to grow as a self-determining individual and to be able to respect and facilitate others in their development and growth as self-determining individuals. In fact, the nature of public agency cannot be adequately thought about unless individuals, in exploring what it means to be self-determining, ask what it is that the state must do in order to facilitate their growth as self-determining agents, and, what in tum, they must do to support the state in its public agency. Taken together these two kinds of agency delineate what it is that we would call the res publica, or as Kant put it, the constitutional republic.

It is clear that right depends not only on the ability to think but also on a willingness to think clearly and carefully about what it means to be an individual or a subject of freedom. Hegel (1991, p. 17, emphases in the original) correctly emphasised that if right is to be actual, we have to engage in the theoretical and practical work of thought:

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of thoughts, is what constitutes the law; and it is this which is justifiably regarded as the main enemy by that feeling which reserves the right to do as it pleases, by that conscience which identifies right with subjective conviction.

Hegel shows that it is self-contradictory to claim right, but to do so without understanding the dependence of right on the universal or constitutional state, but he does not explore the question of our willingness to think about the nature and conditions of right.

This is a complex issue and it returns us to the question of our ambivalence about the project of freedom. As long as we are ambivalent about freedom, we will do what we can to evade thinking about what freedom demands of us as well as of the institutional order that supports us in being free. Ambivalence I suggested above is driven by two different kinds of relationship to the project of freedom: (a) nostalgia for how this project withdraws legitimacy from all group-based identity; and (b) a diffidence about assuming responsibility for our conduct as centres of initiative. In both of these, there is a hankering after an identity that is supplied to us where, accordingly, we do not have to assume responsibility for our conduct, and to do the developmental work that allows us to know when what we think or feel is governed by our inner judgement as distinct from what we think others may expect of us.

As long as we are ambivalent about the project of freedom we will not do what we need to do to think the nature of the human subject as the subject of freedom. This leaves the universal conception of the human subject as the subject of freedom no better articulated than the onto-theological conceptions of natural right or their secular humanist versions offer (see Derrida, 1986).4 These conceptions offer a metaphysical idea of the human being by which I mean the nature of the human being is taken to be given in some sense, and does not require us to work at both explicating and actualising it, work that inevitably exposes the contested nature of ideas of our common humanity, and thereby requires us to enter into rational dialogue about them.

Notes

1. 1 am indebted for good suggestions for revision to the two anonymous readers of this piece for Ciri:enship Studies and to both conversation with David Levine and my reading of his recent work.

2. "By globalism I mean the view that the world market eliminates or supplants political action-that is. the ideology of rule by the world market. the ideology of neoliberalism ... The central task of politics. which is to define the basic legal. social and ecological conditions under which economic activity first becomes socially possible and legitimate, drops out of view or is suppressed' (Beck, 20<Xl. p. 9).

3. It is a sobering lesson to realise how readily our own embrace of the project of freedom, say as feminists struggling against the demands of others of us as women, turns into group-ba~ed identification of a kind that substituted another form of external direction of us (for some discussion, see Yeatman, 1993). Any oppositional politics risks its attachment to freedom turning into a panicularistic identity politics. where 'we' are valorised in relation to 'them'.

4. 'What was named in this way. in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way. was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God. the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure ... Thus defined, human­ism or anthropologism ... was the common ground of Christian or atheist existentialisms, of the philosophy of values (spiritualist or not), of personalisms of the right or left, of Marxism in the classical style. And

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if one takes one's bearings from the terrain of political ideologies, anthropologism was the unperceived and uncontested common ground of Marxism and of Social-Democratic or Christian-Democratic discourse' (Derrida, 1986, pp. 116-7).

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