Power
•
Robert Dahl — power is decision making (making someone do something they wouldn’t – visible)
•
Bachrach, Baratz — power is agenda-setting (largely invisible)
•
Steven Lukes — power is ideology shaping
•
Michel Foucault — power is individual shaping (through governmental decisions)
Approaches to PP
•
Normative approach — the best form of government, justification/denial of political obligation
•
Descriptive approach (Macchiavelli)— conflictual paradigm
•
Existentialist approach (Hannah Arendt) — plurality (of character and uniqueness), natality of ideas,
mortality. Labor (survival) v. work (creativity)
Aristotelian v. contractarian paradigm
•
Aristotle — family, village, polis (historical, natural, hierarchical, communitarian process)
o Marsilio of Padua — civil communities grow over time
o Jean Bodin — commonwealth (family, village, state. The absolute power of the state over families)
•
Contractarians — rationalistic, artificial, voluntary contract (ahistorical, anti-natural as in hypothetical,
egalitarian, individualistic). SoN is destined to end, negative justification of the ideal state (liberal, dem,
absolutistic)
The SoN and the social contract
•
Thomas Hobbes — violent State of Nature (scarcity), physical equality, natural rights (self-defense) v.
natural laws (seek peace, renounce r. everything, respect the pact),
•
John Locke — peaceful → violent SoN (abundance → indecision on justice + accumulation through
money), juridical equality (r. life, property, liberty),
•
Jean-Jacque Rousseau — SoN of primordial, happy isolation, pity, and compassion. Civilization is caused
by self-preservation, free will, and self-improvement. Adding corrupted means for corrupted ends
Justification of the state (contractarian, utilitarian, theory of fairness)
•
Contractarians — society is based on an artificial voluntary contract. Nobody has been consulted
o John Locke — tacit consent. Accepting the benefits and residence in the state is consent (leave if
you don't agree)
▪
David Hume — people can't leave their homes easily
▪
Rousseau — residence consent is right only in a system of free states (EU?)
o Immanuel Kant — hypothetical consent. In SoN, we would find it rational to make a civil state.
▪
•
Utilitarian justification, justification of disposition to accept the state, not of its formation
Utilitarians (J. Bentham here) — the morally correct action is the one that generates the most utility. Utility
gives legitimacy.
o Individual ≠ collective utility, morally just ≠ useful, utility is subjective
•
Duty of fairness (H. L. Hart) — obligation to obey from the sacrifices of fellow citizens. Unfair to benefit
without paying the costs
o Nozick — unwanted benefits don't create obligation
•
Realists (Macchiavelli) — conflict between social and political forces stabilizes the state
Negative/positive liberty (Norberto Bobbio, Isaiah Berlin)
•
Benjamin Constant (lib. of the ancients comp. to lib. of the modern) — liberty is participation in the ancient
world, peaceful independence in modern democracies.
•
Negative — freedom to act until it is stopped by the law. Originally Hobbesian concept (natural laws which
are not enforced in SoN). Never completely suppressed (≠positive lib.). According to liberals, neg. freedom
must be as wide as possible:
o J. S. Mill's harm principle (contextual and historical values), interested rights-based principle (not
injuring interests of another), and liberal rights principle (property, security, liberty).
o Bentham and Hans Kelsen — rights can only be created by the law (no natural rights)
o Mill — refuses natural rights, rights are to be protected because they maximize utility. Liberty
allows for ideas to be put to the test, and through dialectic experimentation, we have advancements
(i.e., public sphere)
o Wolff — liberty is at risk with maximizing utility, consider liberty as intrinsically useful
•
Positive — coercion is decided by us as citizens (only in democracies)
o Modern communitarian/democratic tradition (C. Taylor/ Micheal Sandel) — critique of liberalism:
atomism that undermines the importance of communities in identity shaping. Even the idea of
freedom often comes from what our community thinks.
o Socialist tradition (K. Marx) — one is free when actions are legally allowed and materially possible.
Political ≠ human emancipation, societal discrimination impedes true human emancipation. Political
emancipation is the tool of the capitalists to justify power, done also through ideological, cultural,
and political control. Marx points out the apparent political power of the masses and the real
economic, cultural, social power of the bourgeoisie.
Equality
•
Formal equality (paired with negative liberty) and material equality (paired with positive liberty).
o Locke on property rights — right to own and trade your property (fundamental for market). Initial
acquisition: survival argument (take what you need for survival), labor mixing argument (take what
you mixed with your labor - Nozick's soup in the sea), value-added argument (labor mixing but with
adding value). All these arguments entitle to the fruits of labor.
•
Wolff suggests using distributive justice and considering the problem as a branch of market justice (free
market):
o Left liberals believe that free markets are less despotic, rational than planned ones. Free markets
emphasize negative externalities and undersupply good ones. Joseph Stiglitz wants state
intervention.
o Right liberals believe in price system (indicator of human desires) and profit motivation
(commitment to satisfy). Adam Smith's butcher.
o Marxists think that the market is wasteful because of its instability (cicle of prosperity and
recession). Wasteful (unemployment) and alienating (bc people are not owners of their work). Is
alienation a consequence of capitalism or of modern technology and the assembly line?
Exploitation allows the middle class to avoid work. Weber/Schumpeter say that capitalists risk their
investments. The idea of property rights entitles to the fruits of labor but not to means of production
(Locke) and every work is a collective experience (Marx, Grundrisse). Social inequality tilts the
balance of political equality
•
Planned economy — state-owned means of production, goal of production is general interest, distribution of
goods from the state (≠market). Failed because: lack of info on consumers desires, lack of commitment to
fulfill said desires.
Justice (Rawlsian model)
•
Plato's division of justice:
o Commutative justice: fair compensations and punishments (regulation of private sphere,
proportionality)
o Distributive justice: guides public authority in distribution of material and immaterial goods
(relationship between citizen and state)
•
In the ancient world justice didn't come from freedom and equality since not everyone was on the same
level (women/slaves/human rights), but today justice is a combination of both.
•
Rawlsian theory (John Rawls):
o Pre-political hypothetical agreement under the veil of ignorance (considering justice as an isolated
idea and should correspond to fairness, not utility). Under the veil of ignorance (no personal
preferences, psych. tendencies or knowledge of their place in society) contractors will be impartial
and apply the principles of justice.
o Critique: how can they know such principles without the concept of good? They want "primary
goods" which are all-purpose means towards rights, liberties, opportunities, income, and wealth.
They want these goods as much as possible.
The contractors are rational, mutually disinterested, not envious (this is an ideal position).
o Contractors have the following knowledge about constraints:
- Physical: they know that they will be placed in the society they choose;
- Logical: conclusions must be rationally sustainable;
- Formal: constraint of publicity (everyone knows your choice) and finality (no going back).
o Principles of justice from the original position:
- Liberty: everyone has access to an extensive system of equal basic liberties (can't be sacrificed for
anything else, in the original position you always want as much lib. as possible)
- To handle inequality: difference principle (to the benefit of the least advantaged) and fair
opportunity principle.
•
Problem is designing the best rational choice principle:
o Maximized expected utility principle: utilitarian principle (best average utility – risky)
o Maximax principle: neoliberal principle (always gambling for the best outcome – risky)
o Maximin principle: risk-avert principle (mitigating the worst outcome – safest)
Maximin is the most rational one because it minimizes risks
•
Wolff says that the defeat of utilitarian principle is not an automatic win for maximining (utilitarian
principle can bring a free market in a welfare state). Rawls: in the original position we cannot decide that
society will have a minimum salary.
•
Criticisms of Rawlsian method:
o The hypothetical contract does not involve real choices (no real will), it is not a positive justification
of the state but of the principle of justice;
o Premises (by communitarians – Taylor/Sandel): he prioritizes an individualistic vision of humans
(bias towards liberalism), also fairness should correspond to common good before justice. Marxists
criticize that Rawls forces inequality and capitalism in the future society.
▪
Rawls replies with “realistic utopia”: people as they are (individualistic), laws as they might
be
o Results (by Nozick): difference principle as a pattern principle (method of distributive justice), such
principles can only be justified historically (not imposed through “rationality”). Impossible to follow
both liberty and difference principle: if you give liberty, you can’t impose restrictions on property.
▪
Rawls: liberty principle doesn’t distribute liberty but gives basic liberties, state intervention
is still doable. The principle can be enforced through taxation. Nozick says that progressive
taxation is a form of forced labor.
o Raymond Geuss (left critical theorist) says that Rawls isn’t advocating for welfare system but
trickle-down principle (this idea claims that inequality is in the interest of the poor thanks to the
trickle down of capital).
Identity politics
•
Politics meant to restore the identity of social groups previously discriminated against.
o The minority doesn’t have the goal to transform into the majority;
o It doesn’t claim only an economic dimension, but also cultural and symbolic (through
intersectionality).
•
Feminist movements: today women have formal equality but not material. The first feminists saw
distinctive rights as a bad strategy (admission of gender hierarchy), the new difference feminists (70sAdriana Cavarero) see that helping a struggling group just means realistically assessing the situation. Postfeminist movements (Judith Butler) care about the distinction between sex and gender, one biological and
the other cultural.
o Affirmative action/preferential policies are nothing but an extension of the general idea of equal
opportunities. Affirmative action testifies that we live in an unjust world.
•
Ethnic justice: assimilation (foreigner adapting), multiculturalism (no one adapting), integration (both
citizen and foreigner adapting).
Plato’s epistocracy
•
Forms of government (structure of political authority, e.g. monarchy, democracy, ...) v. forms of state
(societal relations, ideology, historical/sociological characteristics, e.g. socialist state, welfare state, ...)
•
Aristotle’s forms of government (normative – good and bad – and descriptive – number of rulers):
o Aristocracy (→oligarchy)
o Monarchy (→tyranny)
o Politeia (→democracy). Best form for Aristotle
•
Macchiavelli divides into republics (aristocracies and democracies) and principalities (monarchies). Their
correctness depends on the situation (realistic descriptive approach).
•
Montesquieu theorized the separation of power (republics, monarchies, despotisms). The reason for political
obligation: virtue, honor, fear.
•
Gaetano Mosca’s elite theory: the government is always of a minority (not necessarily the richest).
Open/closed elites (Why nations fail? by Robinson and Acemoglu - the failure of adapting). Competition
between elites for the electorate as a sign of democracy.
•
Lincoln’s definition of democracy: government of the people (presence of free people), by the people (selfsufficient), for the people (not enough, there’s enlightened despotism).
•
Plato and democracy: considered as the rule of the violent mob. 4 types of government: democracy (better
than tyranny, mix of oligarchy and aristocracy), timocracy (better overall), oligarchy, aristocracy.
o Craft analogy: the helmsman is always one man, if we leave navigation to the entire crew the ship
will sink. Thus, only trained experts can lead the polis (kings must become philosophers or vice
versa). The intelligent ruling class idea is shared by Lenin’s avantgarde, A. Gramsci, B. Croce
(doctor’s analogy, need for specialization in politics, honesty isn’t enough to save a patient), Monti’s
technocracy.
•
Other critics against democracy:
o Knowledge of voters is limited and incorrect;
o Ignorant voters choose anti-system options (choices based on proud ignorance);
o Not worth getting informed if vote counts as much as an ignorant voter.
•
Solutions to democracy’s problems: plural voting (Mill - one person, multiple votes), requirements
(literacy), epistocratic veto (Jason Brennand - council to veto irrational policies by the people).
•
Critics of epistocracy (Karl Popper indicates Plato and Hegel as threats for liberal democracy):
o Corruption of the guardians: the philosopher king isn’t allowed to own property and this position
would be taken only out of fear of mob rule. The 20th century has shown that rules can be bent when
you are the only de facto ruler;
o Unjust selection of guardians: guardians are selected from a young age and chosen through merit.
Pierre Bourdieu points out that social systems can be meritocratic and unfair (social privileges);
o Plato defends benevolent dictatorship (the guardians are experts not only in governing but also in
knowing the good of the community);
Direct democracy
•
Pure direct democracies are impossible in today’s societies (numerical impossibility). Forms of direct
democracy:
o Assembly government without fiduciaries or representees (Greek polis – small communities);
o Referendums (entire electorate can express their opinion – too expensive);
o Popular government: delegates with specific and revocable mandates (≠ fiduciary), delegates chosen
through lottery and quickly replaceable.
▪
In representative democracies, parties treat the representatives like delegates (fiduciary to
voter, delegate to party)
•
Rousseau considers representative democracy as elected tyrannies (legislative power must be in the hands
of the people, exercised through general will)
•
The general will:
o General will (the will of the common good) ≠ will of all (individual wills united in one, liberal
tradition)
o Thanks to the general will, the legislation can be elaborated by the people as a whole and be general
and abstract (no discrimination)
o Values:
▪
Equality: class inequality leads to different interests. No elimination like Marx but weaking
(never rich enough to buy someone’s vote). Rousseau is against excessive political pluralism
(confuses general will)
▪
(positive) Freedom: freedom is obedience to a self-prescribed law
o Education to civic virtue through:
▪
The legislator: mythical figure with cognitive function (clarifying the importance of general
will) and effective function (encouraging to act in accordance with gen. will). He must create
the social spirit that supervises political institutions.
▪
Civil religion: 4 dogmas – the existence of a good God, the existence of an afterlife with
reward/punishment, sanctity of the social contract, intolerance of intolerant religions.
•
Critics of the general will (there is only the will of all in liberalism):
o Risk of totalitarianism with the general will as an excuse for suppression of protests. Rousseau
answers that education consolidates pre-existing bonds (no artificial orders like tyranny);
o “One can be forced to be free” (=one can be forced to participate in the public life, which entails
positive freedom)
•
Rousseau is against democracy as a form of government. The application of laws is in the hands of a
government (the type of government depends on the situation but for Rousseau it’s ideally an elective
aristocracy) but the legislation is made by the people.
Representative democracy
•
Presidential/parliamentary, political decisions are taken by elected officials
•
There are delegates (spokesmen, messenger with restricted and revokable power) and fiduciaries
(autonomous and act in the interest of the group they represent)
•
The representative can act in the interest of the community or a particular group (in our societies they are
usually fiduciaries who represent general interests)
•
The federalist papers (Madison, Hamilton, Jay) try to convince to ratify the US constitution. Here they
describe a Republic ­­(≠ Rousseau’s Republic), a form of representative government. Madison defined the
direct democracies of the past as the most chaotic form of government.
o Madison linked the republic and territorial dimension of the state (big modern state can’t physically
sustain a direct democracy). Representative democracy is seen as an evolution.
o Mill and Tocqueville say that representative dem. is the only way dem. could have survived
(distinction not opposition)
•
Mill thinks that representative dem. must be judged by its effects: something like illuminated despotism
leads to passivity and inaction and progress is possible only when all citizens are independent.
•
There is also the risk of electing unfit people and bad behavior from voters
o To prevent these issues Mill suggests public education or plural voting. The latter is criticized by
Wolff, useless when people are educated and unjustified when they aren’t at all.
Competitive elitist democracy
•
Max Weber and Schumpeter are political realists who engage in a descriptive approach of representative
democracy. The general conditions of their paradigm:
o Industrial society, presence of the middle class, poorly informed/emotional electorate, ideologic
tolerance, skilled experts and manager, competition between states in the international system
•
Max Weber believed in the rationalization of the state system: connected with the capitalist mode of
production but goes beyond the economic sphere (bureaucratization of politics, concentration of means of
production – metaphor of the iron cage). The analysis is top-down
•
Semi-important elitists:
o Gaetano Mosca: minority always rules (open/closed elite)
o Wilfredo Pareto: circulation of elites' theory, elites are not eternal
o Robert Michels: iron law of oligarchy (democracy implies hierarchy/oligarchy of the parties)
o A. Gramsci: numbers of votes to express the effectiveness and popularity of the ruling class
•
Joseph Schumpeter criticizes the classical doctrine of philosophy (the people, guided by the sense of
common good, elect representatives who carry out their will): no unique and unanimous common good
(people have different interests that can’t be merged, and they are driven by propaganda, not rationality).
The decisive actors are party leaders that compete for the vote of their citizens. His definition of democracy
is that it’s an institutional arrangement to legitimatize leadership.
o The criteria to describe governments becomes the number of elites (democracies have many,
dictatorships few)
o The competition between elites is compared to a market of entrepreneurs (economic theory of
democracy). The innovative elites win
o The people are considered as a bundle of vague impulses (≠Rousseau), weak and prone to emotional
impulses
•
According to Weber there are three forms of legitimation of authority: tradition, legal rationality, and
charisma
Classical pluralist democracy
•
Another attempt at descriptive/realistic analysis of democracy. This model is born from the deficiency of
medium between citizen and party leader in Schumpeter. This model is born in opposition to elitists and
Marxists
•
This model highlights the importance of political groups, cultural associations, trade unions, businesses, and
religious organizations
•
Robert Dahl uses an approach focused on group-action: the focus was transferred from the political sphere
to the social one
•
For Dahl, the difference between democracy and dictatorship isn’t only the number of political elites, but
also the number of social, cultural, and religious minorities. It is this web that prevents dictatorship
•
Democracies aren’t seen as majority rule but polyarchies (with group-policies). This model secures
government for minorities (giving them political recognition)
•
Two forms of pluralism:
o Classic: equal groups who compete for power, government as a natural arbiter, optimistic view of
democracy
o Neo-pluralism: some groups are more powerful, government is not impartial, democracy tilts
towards the most powerful
•
The shift from former to latter (and from descriptive to normative) was made because of critics to the
model: Milban (Marxist) says that pluralism is a veil to hide capitalism and elitists agree with Marxists
•
Neo-liberalism takes form Charles E. Lindblom: elites have both instrumental political power (lobbying)
but also structural power (delocalization/offshoring)
•
Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau theorized the agonistic model, which puts the competitive nature of
groups and gives them a political dimension (something to compete for, unlike both pluralist models)
Legal democracies
•
The New Right (neo-liberalism/neo-conservatism) see political life as individual freedom and initiative
•
General conditions (model famous in the 80s – Reagan and Thatcher): elements from Schumpeter (one
difference: the role of political leaders is not to change agenda – neo-libs don’t meddle with sociology),
•
Main authors: Robert Nozick and Friedrich von Hayek (70s and 20s – Held connects them by similar
thoughts) ≠ Francis Fukuyama’s neo-conservatism
•
Neo-libs seek a liberal and strong state, with a free market society (a society that embodies the principles of
free market)
•
State actions should be kept to a minimum, society should function through free competition (the will of
all), all interventions from the state create a deficient system of choice
o The free state according to von Hayek is a game of catallaxy, a game with competitors and rules, to
succeed you need to satisfy the wishes of the consumers
•
Originally neo-liberalism (20s) was born to combat the idea that free markets can exist without the presence
of a strong state. The market must be created artificially (state), but once it’s set up it works autonomously
(Hayek thought that the state must defend the market)
•
“Why has neo-liberalism re-emerged from the economic crisis it caused?” - Colin Crouch
o Hayek responds with a “basic idea of democracy” - seeing representative democracy as a form of
government (≠form of state). Democracy a mean rather than end:
▪
Rep. democracy as the only peaceful mean to remove someone from power
▪
Rep. democracy as safeguard of individual liberty
▪
Rep. democracy solves the craft analogy (democracy is the only effective method of
education)
•
Hayek accepted democracy only when paired with liberalism (liberalism as a form of government = no
sociological implications, only political)
•
The rule of law ≠ constitutional rule:
o Rule of law must follow formal procedures from the legislators (no general will)
o Laws must be known, their content clear, and not applied retroactively
o He advocates for equality before the law (defense from tyranny of the majority)
o Market should regulate society (not the majority rule, against the idea of doctrine democrats and
Rousseau – majority rule’s power to be extended as far as possible)
•
Hayek's biggest worry is a planned economy (inefficiency caused by state intervention)
o Democracy will be destroyed by the intervention of the state within the economic sphere (any form
of distributive justice is coercive)
o Hayek's legal democracy is a free market society with a minimal but strong state legitimized by the
rule of law (no distributive role of the state).
•
Competitive elitism and legal democracy emerged as winners of the 20th century
Participatory democracies
•
In 1975 a report on the state of democracy by the Trilateral Commission shows that democracy was
endangered by the New Right, making citizens ask for more and more rights and services (overload)
•
Born in opposition to legal democracy by C. B. Macpherson and Caroline Pateman
•
The New Left contested the idea that contemporary democracies are based on free and equal citizens
(gender and ethnicity)
o Macpherson thinks that liberalism was invented to defend capitalism and representative democracies
are the only realistic form of democracy in large states, but also that representative democracies
don’t need to be necessarily liberal. They can be participatory democracies:
▪
He believes in the hierarchy of democracy (R. Michels iron rule of law): to solve this parties
should democratize and try to alleviate their hierarchical nature
▪
He wants the democratization of private groups as well, to abolish the structural acceptance
of hierarchy
Deliberative democracies
•
Began in the 80s with Theodor Adorno and Jurgen Habermas
•
General conditions: value pluralism (acceptance of different equally valuable ideals – multiculturalism),
welfare state
•
Both political and sociological model (presence of small groups)
•
Bernard Manin was against representative democracies as forms of government, the rule of minimal
intervention
•
What matters to him is not political participation but the quality of the discussion (deliberative = equal
possibility to discuss with value in the public sphere)
•
Deliberativists criticized the aggregative vision of democracy (elitist-competitive paradigm and legal
democracy):
o They give for granted that people have fully formed, shared preferences. Electors are often
contradictory and irrational (lower taxes, more services). They seek to inform themselves through
deliberation. The most important thing is not a perfectly designed education system, but citizens
who participate in the debate and information sharing processes
o These ideas reconnect to Arendt’s legacy. Majority rule isn’t enough to define democracy, you also
need high quality, public and open debate
•
Lenin: general will has objective nature, should be based on general deliberation (Deliberative process
where each opinion is taken and valued).
•
By valuing all options, the majority arrives at a conclusion that includes all the other possibilities as
considered. The minority’s opinions still matter: how can this be realized?
o Habermas proposes a formal way (through institutions or rules that impose a balance between
minority/majority) and informal way (influence on final decision)
•
The deliberative model is the most sophisticated defense of democracy from the critique of “mob rule”
•
The idea that discussion can generate more informed decisions is brought by discourse ethics (Jurgen
Habermas and Karl Otto Apel). There are two lines of argumentation:
o Moral theory: in dialogue a deliberation is free and fair only if it isn’t constrained by the authority of
some participants, and the deliberation is just only if force was applied only by the winning
argument. The best moral attitude is of openness to other’s opinion
o Political theory: the political decisions are democratic if individuals will enjoy the same opportunity
to participate in the discussion
o The difference between the two are: political discussion ends in a vote with repercussions and the
citizens who participate aren’t necessarily moral actors (some might want power and have no ideals)
•
To counter this, deliberative thinkers argue that political actors respond to good reasoning, even cynical
politicians
•
Habermas defends this model with a normative approach:
o Apex is the discourse principle (source of argumentation – norms of action on which everyone
would agree, these are both moral and political-juridical)
o From this principle come law and morality (principle of universalization, only those norms which
are in the best interest of the community) principle
•
According to Habermas political philosophers should reconstruct their arguments, keeping in mind that
systems of rights are an articulated system (not only political)
•
Habermas’ definition of democracy includes “social rights” which implement both political rights
(restriction on hate speech) and liberal rights (freedom of expression) as complementary
•
Legally structured legislative procedures are legitimate only if they come from discussion in the public
sphere. Democracy with 2 layers: legality of the formal institution and legitimacy of the discursive practices
in society
•
Habermas wants to prevent bureaucratization of political processes. Even with mass media maniplation, he
still believes that public discussion can be vulnerable to good reasons and rationality
European and cosmopolitan democracies
•
The modern interstate system was based on independence (Giovanni Botero). From a sociological point of
view: territoriality, concentration of power, cultural homogeneity
o Contemporary historians have emphasized that the nation is an artificial construct
•
Globalization appeared as a term in the 70s and became popular in the 90s. Increase in interdependence and
interconnection among economic/political actors
•
The start of this could be Berlin wall, WWI, and discovery of the Americas
•
Some think we have global era; others think that competition between China-US is bringing a deglobalization.
•
Gramsci believed that the reason for the start of WW1 was the contradiction between a cosmopolitan
economy and increasingly nationalistic conception of state
•
The difference between 1 st and 2nd waves of globalization are a shift from international capitalism to
transnational capitalism. Globalization now concerns the sphere of production, finance, and trade
•
Nowadays there is a decline in state sovereignty (delegation of political, economic, military power to
supernational bodies, e.g. EU)
•
The EU is much more of a technocracy. It has been criticized for having a “democratic deficit”, Habermas
looks for causes:
o Particular pattern of policies raised to constitutional level
o Policy making with little democratic influence
o Distance between Europarlament and European citizens
o Absence of a European nation
•
To solve this, Habermas suggests “double sovereignty”: the citizenship of people would be of their state and
the European union. This is done to create a sense of nationality to the EU
•
A cosmopolitan democracy: continuing development of flows, interconnectedness, entrenchment of
democratic rights and obligations, transfer of military to transnational agencies
•
Habermas offers a project of cosmopolitan democracy:
o Formation: in nations force comes before law, in cosmopolises law comes before force
o The most important law is the constitution which should have 3 levels:
▪
Supranational (above states) – defense of peace and human rights
▪
Transnational (among states) - climate change, migration flows, epidemics
▪
Nation state – only at a national level can citizens participate and influence political
decisions
o To Habermas, the vitality of the public sphere can democratize a cosmopolitan society