The Hazy Power Space of Global Domestic Politics

Today, we Europeans act as if Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and so forth, still existed. Yet they have long since ceased to exist, because as soon as the euro was introduced – if not before – these isolated nation-state containers of power and the equally isolated, mutually excluding societies they represented entered the realm of the unreal. To the extent that Europe exists, there is no longer any such thing as Germany, or France, or Italy, or Britain, and so on, as these exist in people's heads and in the picture-book accounts of the historians. This is because the borders, responsibilities and exclusive experiential spaces on which this nation-state world was based no longer exist. But if all this is gone, if all we are doing is thinking, acting and researching in zombie categories, what comes along – or has come along – to take its place?

This is the question which this book raises and attempts to answer, developing a very wide-ranging and fundamental analysis of the social, economic and political transformations of the modern age. In this account the distinction that has underpinned our view of the world to date, namely that between national and international spheres, is being dissolved in what remains a somewhat hazy power space of global domestic politics. Nonetheless, it was this distinction that helped to shape the world of the first modernity, including its key concepts (and theories) of society, identity, state, sovereignty, legitimacy, violence and state authority. This book therefore asks: how might we conceptualize a world and a set of global dynamics in which the problematic consequences of radicalized modernization effectively eliminate the cornerstones and logics of action – certain historically produced fundamental distinctions and basic institutions – of its nation-state order? The answer that is developed and explicated in the following chapters goes as follows: the new global domestic politics that is already at work here and now, beyond the national–international distinction, has become a meta-power game whose outcome is completely open-ended. It is a game in which boundaries, basic rules and basic distinctions are being renegotiated – not only those between the ‘national’ and ‘international’ spheres, but also those between global business and the state, transnational civil society movements, supranational organizations and national governments and societies.

If those things that fall within the ‘national’ framework are no longer national and those that fall within the ‘international’ framework are no longer international, then the political realism of the national outlook is a false realism. Its place is taken instead – so this book contends – by a cosmopolitan realism, which needs to be fully explored conceptually in terms of its logics of power. Cosmopolitan realism focuses not only on the crucial role of global economic power and global business actors in relations of cooperation and competition among states, but also on the strategies of transnational civil society movements, including ‘uncivil’ – that is, terrorist – networks which mobilize privatized violence against states for their own political purposes.

Cosmopolitan realism, or Machiavellianism, provides an answer to two questions in particular. First, what are the strategies by which global business actors impose their own rules of action upon states? And, second, how can states for their part win back political meta-power qua states in relation to global business actors, in order to impose a cosmopolitan regime on global political capital that encompasses political freedom, global justice, a secure social order and ecological sustainability? This New Global Political Economy acquires its relevance and explanatory power, on the one hand, from the fact that it is expounded as a theory of power about the strategic scope for action available in a transnational economy; on the other hand, it also takes up the counter-question suggested by this, namely, how can the world of state-organized politics (with its basic concepts, its strategic sphere of power, its institutional possibilities and constraints) be opened up to the challenges not only of the global economy but also of the global problems that are a consequence of modernization?

There are a number of signs pointing to the fact that a culture of glob-ality is advancing upon us and possibly even gaining in dominance – among other things, the fact that, in the maelstrom of globalized modernization, global problems have long since become an everyday reality. Climate change, environmental destruction, food risks, global financial risks, migration, the anticipated consequences of innovations in genetics, human genetics, nanotechnology, and so forth, all serve to call into question in a quite tangible way the very foundations of social life. The nation-state has ceased to be the source of a frame of reference that encompasses all other frames of reference and enables political answers to be found. Moreover, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 teach us that power does not translate into security. In this one radically divided world, it is likely that security will only be achieved once people's willingness and ability to see the world of unrestrained modernity through the eyes of the other, through the lens of difference, have been awakened at a cultural level and have become a part of our everyday existence. The task of creating a cosmopolitan common sense of this sort – a spirit of recognition of the difference of others which pervades ethnic, national and religious traditions and brings them to life in the course of mutual exchange – is, after 11 September, no longer merely an idle, naïve verbal conjuring trick, but has become much more a question of survival – not least the survival of militarily superior states.

In this respect, this book can be read as an answer to the question of how the neo-nationalist turn in many parts of the world can be countered intellectually, morally and politically. Once the power sphere of global domestic politics is opened up conceptually and politically, beyond the old categories of ‘national’ and ‘international’, prospects emerge for a cosmopolitan renewal of politics and the state.

Globalization is not destiny; it can be shaped and influenced. Indeed, it has the capacity to reinvigorate what has classically been known as ‘politics’ and to give it new foundations. This message is the theme of a trilogy of which this book forms the first part. Power in the Global Age deals with the way in which the national and international forms of ‘legitimate domination’ (Max Weber) are being dissolved and its rules rewritten in the globalized power game of mobile capital, states and social movements. This situation requires a change of perspective from the national to the cosmopolitan vision, one whose realism and meanings – as well as its dangers – are explained and developed in The Cosmopolitan Vision. In the final part of the trilogy, Cosmopolitan Europe (co-authored with Edgar Grande), this perspective is put to the test and illustrated by means of concrete historical examples.

Ulrich Beck

Preface

The people we elected have no power.

And the people that have power weren't elected.

Demonstrator's placard

What are the foundations of legitimate domination in the global age?¹ The worrying aspect of this question lurks unarticulated in the background of every controversy of our time and provides the impetus for this book: we think we know what we are talking about when we use the words ‘politics’ and ‘state’, and yet we know full well that we don't know what we are talking about. Everybody knows that politics takes place in parliaments, in governments, in political parties and in election campaigns. Yet is it not these very pre-packaged answers to every inquiry about the grounds of legitimate domi-nation that prevent us from understanding the language of the power struggles that rock the world?

We blithely carry on believing that we know to which authorities we must appeal if we want public welfare issues dealt with at long last. But then we read in the financial pages of the newspaper that capital flows are moving here and there according to the rules of a global market that eludes all nation-state controls. Our daily lives are profoundly influenced by the export of jobs, flexible production siting, information flows, global symbolic systems and supranational organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. We witness the way in which ‘global ecological crises’ and the ‘international political economy’ – key problems on which experts hold differing opinions – increasingly determine the political agenda. Listening to legal experts, we are given the impression that it is no longer states alone that create and administer international law(s). Local activist groups act globally while global corporations call the shots locally, managing at the same time to avoid their legal obligation to pay commercial taxes. States threaten – and engage in – military intervention in other states based on the appeal to human rights. And, to highlight one final example, the universalization of ‘the terrorist threat’ leads even democratic military powers and states down the dangerous path of granting themselves a general ‘licence to kill’ anyone suspected of being a ‘terrorist’. We can no longer rule out the possibility that we are sliding inexorably towards an age of ‘perpetual peace’ in which the boundaries to ‘perpetual war’ can no longer be drawn – that a kind of ‘peace’ has set in which is worse than war. But in this context of blurred and confused boundaries and distinctions, what does it mean to speak of ‘legitimate domination’?

What is currently taking place – so this book argues – is a creative self-destruction of the nation-state-dominated ‘legitimate’ world order. This is a highly ambiguous development, but one which also contains the possibility (alongside many other possible scenarios) of a ‘cosmopolitan vision’, the development of politics towards what we might call a ‘cosmopolitan state’. Note, the issue is not that of a clash of civilizations, but rather of the struggle for a human culture in which very different traditions are able to live alongside one another. No wall can protect the countries of the centre from the humanitarian disasters occurring in other parts of the world. The new dangers facing humanity from the modern risk society make no distinctions of race, nation or continent.

There is a new cosmopolitan realism in the air! The concept of cosmopolitanism has been a part of Western civilization's philosophical and political tradition since at least the time of Kant, but, in order to glean a realistic critique of prevailing conditions from it, some ‘dusting off’ is required: the term needs to be subjected to a ‘redemptive critique’ (Walter Benjamin). By ‘cosmopolitan’ I do not mean the elitist, idealistic concept that serves as an ideological spearhead for the imperial designs of transnational elites and organizations. What I am thinking of instead are the values of an acknowledged, lived diversity that pervade every social situation and historical context, a ‘cosmopolitan common sense’ that takes a hold of large sections of humanity and enables them to shape seemingly unstoppable developments.

At the start of the third millennium the maxim of national realpolitik – that national interests must be pursued by national means – needs to be replaced by the maxim of cosmopolitan realpolitik, namely ‘the more cosmopolitan our political life, the more national and successful it will be.’ Only a politics that is multilateral is capable of opening up unilateral options for action. If global problems did not exist, they would have to be invented, as they create a common transnational context. The national zero-sum game of sovereignty that exists in many people's heads is proving to be historically false: interdependence can and must be created and understood as a plus-sum game in which all the parties involved make power gains.

It is this seemingly paradoxical core proposition of the new cosmopolitan realism that this book sets out to elucidate. In an age of global crises and risks, the politics of ‘golden handcuffs’ – the creation of a close-knit network of transnational dependencies – leads states to regain their national independence, along with and in spite of the power gains made by a highly mobile global business constituency.

Highly contradictory cultural currents encounter one another in very limited spaces and enter into what are often highly conflict-laden associations. Bilingualism (that is, the ability to let go of one's fixation on what is familiar), lives lived out in multiple locations, constant mobility, more and more people holding dual passports, lives that straddle more than one border – all this creates a complex web of divided loyalties, without those identities experienced as original being abandoned in the process. To have both roots and wings – provincialism linked with the wealth of experience gained from being an active citizen of the world – could become the common denominator of a civilization made up of societies containing heterogeneous global cultures. And, as a result, it may even provide an answer to the fundamental question on everybody's lips: what kind of order does the world need?

This acknowledgement of difference – not to be confused with state-prescribed versions of happy multicultural co-existence – opens up a multidimensional sphere of possibilities, but is not without its own radical internal contradictions. It is not merely an issue of the growing gap between rich and poor, of global pockets of welfare and global poverty traps between North and South. Nor is it exclusively an issue of the conditions necessary for a life lived in dignity, or of the possibility and impossibility of creating a global-sized mini-welfare state, a ‘globalized Keynesianism’, even if the latter were geared solely towards the minima moralia of basic needs. It is about much more than this. Cosmopolitan vision has to do with the way in which basic nation-state institutions can be opened up in the long term, from below as well as from within, to the challenges of the global age. It has to do with the way minorities, foreigners and the socially excluded are treated. Above all, however, it has to do with the role of the state and of governments in these contexts, a role that is fundamentally changing and whose contours still need to be defined. It has to do with the problems thrown up in the process of consolidating and reconstituting democratic societies in the global age, and the role of different groups’ and parties’ human rights in this. It has to do with the question of what functional equivalents there might be to the state, and in particular with the question of how outbreaks of violence stemming from people's disappointments and humiliations can be countered preventively.

Cosmopolitan vision thus combines respect for the dignity of those who are culturally different with an interest in the survival of each individual. In other words, cosmopolitanism is the next big idea to follow on after the historically worn-out ideas of nationalism, communism, socialism and neo-liberalism, and this idea might just make the improbable possible, namely the survival of humanity beyond the twenty-first century without a lapse back into barbarism.

The coercive dynamics of the global market economy have transformed the rules of global politics. With the removal of the boundaries around economics, politics and society, a new struggle for power and counter-power has got underway. Furthermore, the rules of legitimate domination itself are being renegotiated. However, there is no cause for jubilation at the knowledge that a new, irrevocable ‘cosmopolitan modernity’ is emerging, since that knowledge is necessarily accompanied by a great deal of ambiguity – indeed, how could it be otherwise after the experience of unbridled totalitarian poli-tics in what was a twentieth century marked by one catastrophe after another? There is a specific reason for describing the whole ideology of the nation-state-based economy, society and politics retrospectively as the first modernity and distinguishing it from what as yet remains a somewhat hazy second modernity (defined by global ecological and economic crises, widening transnational inequalities, individualization, precarious forms of paid work and the challenges of cultural, political and military globalization). That reason is to overcome the ‘protectionist reflex’ that has paralysed Europe as well as other parts of the world, both intellectually and politically, since the collapse of the bipolar world order. Accordingly, it is the meta-transformation of the economy, politics and statehood in the global age that constitutes the focus of this book. What had seemed to be highly stable ideals and coordinates of change are themselves undergoing a transformation, as are the foundations and basic concepts of power and domination, legitimation and violence, the economy, the state and politics as well. The key question of how the second modernity might become a cosmopolitan modernity is directed towards the realization of an alternative order with political freedom and social and economic justice at its centre (rather than the rules of the global market). Globalization is being fashioned by the powerful against the interests of the poor. There is no advancement of cross-cultural interaction among different societies; instead, the interests of one particular society are being pursued in opposition to those of all the others. By contrast, the cosmopolitan imagination represents the universal interests of humanity itself. It is an attempt to rethink interdependency and reciprocity beyond the limits of national axioms and national arrogance, in the sense of a cosmopolitan realism capable of stimulating and sharpening our faculties of perception to take in the unfamiliar, ‘glocally’ networked societies in which we live and act.

This book owes more to conversations with friends and colleagues than any other that has emerged from my workshop. Edgar Grande, who embo-dies the creativity of our jointly run ‘Reflexive Modernization’ research centre in Munich, helped to establish its conceptual shape in a series of conversations that went on for whole days at a time. Christoph Lau, likewise a creative pillar of our research centre and co-developer of the theory of reflexive modernization on the empirical side, witnessed the frequent appearance of each new version of this text and offered his insightful comments with characteristic humour. I also owe a great deal to workshop conversations with Boris Holzer, one of the very few people who are comfortable in very different social scientific cultures. Almut Kleine endured the many hardships associated with the writing of this book, and for her forbearance I am most grateful. Armin Nassehi, Kari Palonen, Shalini Randeria, Natan Sznaider, Bob Jessop, Mats Sørensen and Peter Wehling commented very helpfully on an earlier version.

It was both a pleasure and a privilege to be able to participate in the intellectually stimulating environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science fostered by its then director, Anthony Giddens; that environment has played a crucial role in shaping the cosmopolitan imagination of this book. This particularly includes conversations shared with Mary Kaldor, David Held, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, Ralf Dahrendorf, Stanley Cohen, Don Slater, Roger Silverstone and many others besides; also, in the context of Goldsmiths College, conversations with Angela McRobbie and Scott Lash. And, last but not least, Jürgen Habermas took the time to talk through an earlier version of this book with me. I owe more to my intellectual fellow traveller Johannes Willms than I can recount here. Above all, though, this book represents a part of my never-ending conversation with Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, for which ‘gratitude’ is too weak a word.

The Volkswagenwerk Foundation enabled me to work on this book by providing a generous grant – for this, too, I offer my sincere thanks.

Ulrich Beck