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Dialectical Snares: Human Rights and Democracy in the World Society

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Philosophical Dimensions of Human Rights

Abstract

The paper starts with a thesis on the dialectical structure of modern law that goes back to the European revolutionary tradition and constitutes a legal structure that is at once emancipatory and repressive. Once it became democratic, the modern nation state has solved more or less successfully the crises that have emerged in modern Europe since the sixteenth century. Yet, this state did not escape the dialectical snares of modern law and modern legal regimes. It’s greatest advance, the exclusion of inequalities, presupposed the exclusion of the internal other of blacks, workers, women, etc., and the other that stemmed from the non-European world that furthermore was under European colonial rule or other forms of European, North American, or Japanese imperial control. Yet, the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century led to a complete reconstruction, new foundation, and globalization of all national and international law. The evolutionary advance of the twentieth century was the emergence of world law, and this enabled the construction of international and national welfarism and the global expansion of the exclusion of inequalities. Nevertheless, the dialectic of enlightenment returned and led to new forms of post-national domination, hegemony, oppression, and exclusion. The final section of the paper tries to detect some ideas and principles for how to overcome the crisis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kant ([1870] 1996); Hegel (2001 [1821] § 4); Marx, K. ([1842] (1988), 58 and 109–47).

  2. 2.

    Rawls (1993).

  3. 3.

    On the latter: Kesselring (1984).

  4. 4.

    Berman (2006, 5 ff.).

  5. 5.

    Law of collision or ‘Kollisionsrecht’ (Joerges, Teubner, Fischer-Lescano) has deep roots in Western constitutional law. One can describe this with Chantal Mouffe also as transformation from antagonism to agonism – if one keeps in mind (against Mouffe) the constitutive role of constitutional law in this transformational process.

  6. 6.

    On the exclusion of inequalities as a condition of a successful nation-state see: Stichweh (2000, 52).

  7. 7.

    This hangs together with the premises of the theory of the social contract, see: Kersting (2002).

  8. 8.

    Article 35 of the concluding protocol of the Berlin Conference on West Africa on West Africa in 1884/85. See: Koskenniemi (2004, 126).

  9. 9.

    The best point of a poor book is the thesis that neither old nor new notions of imperialism with a territorial centre make sense in a functionally differentiated world society and have to be replaced by a more and more de-territorialized and flexible kind of (systemic) hegemony: Hardt and Negri on Empire (2000). For a much better account the systemic transformation of hegemony: Fischer-Lescano and Teubner (2005); Buckel (2007); for an interesting thesis on the emergence of a new and imperial world state see: Chimni (2004).

  10. 10.

    On societal structure: Brunkhorst (2009); on global culture: Meyer (1997, 144–181 and 2005).

  11. 11.

    Rorty (1993, 111–20); Roy (2006).

  12. 12.

    Parsons (1969, 17); Parsons and Platt (1990); Döbert et al. (1980).

  13. 13.

    Brunkhorst (2008b, 30–63 and 37).

  14. 14.

    For a first account of this thesis: Brunkhorst (2008a); Brunkhorst (2008b).

  15. 15.

    See only: Sunstein (1993), Roosevelt, cited in Sunstein (1993, XI). On the development of social anti-discrimination rights in the Soviet Union, see Berman (1963).

  16. 16.

    Grimm (1990); see also Grimm (1991); Luhmann (1981a); classically: Neumann (1937).

  17. 17.

    Historically instructive is an activist of the New Deal: Seagle (1941). More up to date: Maurer (2006, § 16).

  18. 18.

    Luhmann (1981a); Berman (1963, esp. 277 ff.). On an astonishing and peculiar parallel between the Soviet educational law and the Puritan codex of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the “Body of Liberties” of 1641, see: Berman (1991, 64 ff.). Concerning the beginning in the 1930s, see Joerges and Ghaleigh (2003).

  19. 19.

    For a more comprehensive overview: Brunkhorst (2008a).

  20. 20.

    Streek (2005). As we now can see, the talk about late capitalism was not wrong but should be restricted to state-embedded capitalism, and state embedded capitalism indeed is over. But what then came was not socialism but global disembedded capitalism which seems to be as far from state embedded capitalism of the old days as from socialism.

  21. 21.

    There Will Be Blood, USA 2007, Director: Paul Thomas Anderson. One-sided but in this point striking the neo-Pashukanian analysis of international law by Mieville (2005).

  22. 22.

    On transnational administrative during the last few years a whole industry of research emerged, see only: Tietje (2003), Möllers (2005a), Krisch and Kingsbury (2006), Kingsbury et al. (2005), Möllers et al. (2007), Fischer-Lescano (2008). On the globalization of executive power: Wolf (2000), Dobner (2006), Lübbe-Wolf (2008).

  23. 23.

    For the thesis that the UN-Charter is the one and only constitution of the global legal and political order, see: Fassbender (1998). Different approaches in: Bogdandy (2003), Albert and Stichweh (2007), Bogdandy (2006), Brunkhorst (2002), Brunkhorst (2005a); For the thesis of constitutional pluralism see: Teubner (2003).

  24. 24.

    For the original version of this thesis: Brunkhorst (2002).

  25. 25.

    [Reform according to Principles. –Ed. Trans.].

  26. 26.

    A paradigmatic account is: Rorty (1980). For recent developments cf. Brandom (1994); Habermas (1997).

  27. 27.

    Merkl (1927, 160, 169), Merkl (1968, 252–94).

  28. 28.

    Von Bernstorff (2008, 167–90, at 181).

  29. 29.

    Von Bernstorff (2001).

  30. 30.

    This comes close to Habermas’ normatively strong or Luhmann’s normatively neutralized idea of circulations of communication without a subject (subjektlose Kommunikationskreiläufe). Habermas (1992), Luhmann (1983); in conjunction with: Neves (2000).

  31. 31.

    Kelsen ([1920] 1981), Kelsen ([1925] 1993), Kelsen ([1934] 1967).

  32. 32.

    Nothing is necessary in a democratic legal regime except the normative idea of equal freedom: Kant ([1870] 1996), Maus (1992), Brunkhorst (2005b, 37 and 67–77), Möllers (2008a, 13–14 and 16).

  33. 33.

    Kelsen ([1920] 1981).

  34. 34.

    Möllers (2001, 423).

  35. 35.

    Maus (1992), Habermas (1992).

  36. 36.

    Möllers (2008b, 160–82).

  37. 37.

    Habermas (1992, 170 and 492–3).

  38. 38.

    Kantorowicz (1957).

  39. 39.

    Habermas (1992, 170 and 492–3), Möllers (2005b).

  40. 40.

    Democratic legitimization is inclusive because it governed by the one and only constitutional principle of democracy, and that is the principle of self-legislation or autonomy. This principle is socially inclusive because it presupposes that a procedure of legitimization that is democratic has to include everybody who is concerned by legislation and jurisdiction. Consequently, all exceptions (e.g. babies) have to be justified publicly and need compensation through human rights; cf.; Müller (1997, 76), Marks (2000).

  41. 41.

    Marks (2000).

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 103, 149.

  43. 43.

    ‘All men’ can mean many different things, e.g. all men in a bus, all men on German territory, all men with US passports (which is far less than all US citizens), all men on the globe, all men in the universe, all men who are French citizens, all men who are addressed by a certain legal norm. Democracy and democratic legitimization is only concerned with the last two meanings, and the possible tension between them.

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Brunkhorst, H. (2012). Dialectical Snares: Human Rights and Democracy in the World Society. In: Corradetti, C. (eds) Philosophical Dimensions of Human Rights. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2376-4_11

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