Transnationalizing the Public Sphere

Introduction

Kate Nash

‘Public’ is a kind of placeholder to allow consideration of the moral dimension of democratic politics. We talk about public interest, public goods, public policy. In each case ‘public’ is counterposed to ‘private’, the realm of individual freedom that is increasingly commodified and collapsed into markets. It is also, more controversially, counterposed to the ‘private’ of domestic space. ‘Public’ designates an area of social life that is more than markets, institutions, individuals, or organized groups. There are a number of ways of filling the term, but since Kant and Rousseau elaborated the importance of publicity, reason, and the general will in the eighteenth century, the ‘public’ as the site, the topic, and the outcome of democratic debate has been influential in theory and practice. Since then too, socialist, feminist, anti-colonialist, and anti-racist movements have been working hard to throw suspicion on attempts to define ‘equality’, ‘person’, or indeed ‘reason’ too narrowly when talking about ‘public’ interest, goods, policy. The ideal of the public sphere, if it is invari­ably concretized in exclusionary ways, always also gestures beyond itself, to ideals of genuine participation in establishing the common good.

Participation in the public sphere must not only be inclusive and reflexive, it must also be effective. Democratic will formation must at some point be translated into law and policy. Radical suspicion of the public sphere is often pessimistic in this respect: where corporate and conservative lobby groups invariably hold more sway than others when it comes to making decisions that count, the ideal of the public sphere serves to mask domination and exclusion rather than to open up genuine participation. For many radicals the task at hand, then, is not to try to work out what kind of democratic discussion and decision-making could ensure that law and policy are really legitimate, but rather to question the language of legitimacy itself. (Today this is at least as likely to be done in the tradition of Nietzsche, with Foucault and Deleuze, as it is in the name of Marx.) But in any form of social life in which there is integration beyond local, face-to-face encounters, the problem of how to institutionalize decisions cannot be avoided. For radical democrats, how to make governing institutions responsive to ordinary people will always be a vital question.

It is a question that becomes all the more complex when we think about globalization. There are undoubtedly global public goods – which are collectively useful or necessary but which markets do not provide: at the very minimum a liveable environment and rights to bodily integrity (not to be killed or tortured, and to be fed and sheltered). And there are global public bads – externalities produced in one country that affect everyone, directly or indirectly (contributing to climate change, to conditions that lead to the collapse of nationally managed economies, to support for international terrorism). Then there are regional or transnational public goods and bads that affect people in areas that cross the borders of different states (war often makes for refugees in a neighbouring country, pollution does not respect state territories). There is a growing network of institutions and organizations of regional and global governance that make public policy and law on a range of transnational issues – the environment, war, migration, human rights, trade and finance. But what are the implications for democracy once it is understood that states, whilst still nominally sovereign, do not independently establish the conditions under which people live within their borders?

Although there is a good deal of interesting political theory now on how global governance must be democratized, the formation of the public sphere beyond the nation-state has received surprisingly little critical attention. Habermas has argued that a global public sphere is absolutely necessary to democratize law- and policy-making where concerns are truly global. For him, however, relatively little is global: he argues that a world organization, whilst performing a vital role as representing world unity, should actually only have the specialized tasks of keeping the peace and guaranteeing human rights (though actually, this is far from minimal) (Habermas 2009: 120). Most political issues related to globalization are transnational; and open, responsive, overlapping, and transparent national and regional (e.g., European) public spheres that enable citizens and governments to learn to become less concerned with defending national interests would be sufficient to negotiate the making of law and policy to regulate cross-border affairs (Habermas 2001, 2009). Habermas is, however, sceptical about whether any of this might be possible today. In contrast, some have argued that the internet enables the possibility of a deliberative ‘public of publics’ at the global scale (Bohman 2007), and that transnational social movements are actually now achieving a form of global public sphere (Castells 2009; Guidry et al. 2000; Smith 2007). In addition, the idea of global civil society is often used in ways that suggest it is democratic. In such accounts, largely because of the history of the term ‘civil society’ in the democratization of countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America in the late twentieth century, the activities of left-liberal NGOs (e.g., Friends of the Earth, Human Rights Watch) are treated as legitimate, though their activities do not necessarily involve the participation of those most affected by the solutions they advocate. We will do well, then, to ask whether those theorists who see transnational public spheres as possible, necessary, or already existing are actually talking about the same thing. What connections do they make between ‘global civil society’, ‘public sphere’, and ‘democracy’? And do the connections they make, or perhaps assume, stand up to critical scrutiny? What is needed is in-depth consideration from a range of perspectives concerning what ‘transnationalizing the public sphere’ actually requires, normatively and empirically, and how we might conceptualize it in relation to the democratic deficit of existing political institutions.

Nancy Fraser, whose work has made such an important contribution to debates over the structure of the public sphere in relation to nation-states, has taken up this challenge. In the title essay, ‘Transnationalizing the Public Sphere’, she carefully and clearly analyses what we might expect from a critical discussion of the concept of ‘public sphere’ if it is ‘scaled up’. As she says, critical theory walks a line between adapting the normative conditions of the public sphere as it was developed in relation to nation-states so that these now correspond to existing globalizing realities, and adapting them in an idealized way that does not give any purchase on historically unfolding possibilities (pp. 9–10, this volume). Fraser clearly lays out what she thinks must be retained of Habermas's conception of the public sphere if it is to be ‘scaled up’ (noting how he has developed it since The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) as a result of the debates to which she and others contributed so creatively.

Following Fraser's essay, the other contributors to this volume, in the spirit of critical debate, then raise searching questions about her theoretical premises and arguments. A number of us raise questions about the fundamentals of Habermas's theory of the public sphere. Fraser herself expresses doubts about whether he has really been able to reconcile the limitations of empirical debate in complex soci­eties with ideals of democratic legitimacy (p. 18 and p. 35 n. 12, this volume). Can such a fundamental problem really be bracketed (Nash)? And what if the emergence of the public sphere in modern states that were also imperial is more than a contingent fact? What if the ideal itself is limited by the conditions under which it was created (Hutchings)?

In terms of the aims of critical theory as Fraser has stated them, the contributors raise questions about the empirical claims underpinning her call to reflect on how the public sphere might be ‘scaled up’. If practices resembling the public sphere historically enabled the development of critical tools with which to assess ‘actually existing’ democracy at the national level, does this mean the concept ‘public sphere’ can be used in a similar way at the global level? It may be premature to give up on local and national publics which, while bounded in space and still linked to national states, need not be bounded in terms of the identities and orientations of those who get involved in or who are addressed by them. Or it may be that, where a global state is unlikely to develop in the near future, and where the desirability of such a development is itself doubtful, it is mistaken to try to ‘scale up’ at all. Why not consider rather how national and local publics may actually be transnationalizing, especially considering that state capacities remain massively important (Couldry)? Alternatively, we might ask whether organizations that are actually concerned not with democracy at all, but rather with particular issues of global injustice, may nevertheless have a democratizing impact at the global scale. Might NGOs concerned with, say, human rights make institutions of global governance more...