Another Cosmopolitanism

At the end of her postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt offers a cautionary prediction about the limits of international law. She writes: “It is quite conceivable that certain political responsibilities among nations might some day be adjudicated in an international court; what is inconceivable is that such a court would be a criminal tribunal which pronounces the guilt or innocence of individuals.” For Seyla Benhabib who will give a keynote address at the Hannah Arendt Center’s conference Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics, Arendt’s caution about an international criminal court is a “baffling” challenge. Why, Benhabib asks, does “Arendt deny that an International Criminal Court is conceivable?” 

Sixty years after publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, we have witnessed the “evolution of global civil society which is characterized by a transition from international to cosmopolitan norms of justice.” These cosmopolitan norms of justice “accrue to individuals as moral and legal persons in a worldwide civil society.” And they make “starkly visible” what Benhabib calls the “paradox of democratic legitimacy,” that even democratic states with liberal legal systems and also individuals in those states must conform to higher “norms of cosmopolitan justice.” 

Benhabib articulates a vision of cosmopolitan justice, not a system of international law. She articulates an ideal of cosmopolitanism “as the emergence of norms that ought to govern relations among individuals in a global civil society. These norms are neither merely moral nor just legal. They may best be characterized as framing the ‘morality of the law,’ but  in a global rather than a domestic context.”  There is, in other words, a global or cosmopolitan moral and legal order that supercedes domestic and national democratic ideas of law and justice.
 
The tension that Benhabib explicitly embraces in her vision of “Another Cosmopolitanism,” is that this emergent cosmopolitan order—which signals “the eventual legalization and juridification of the rights claims of human beings everywhere, regardless of their membership in bounded communities”—must also exist alongside an equally real and important membership “in bounded communities, which may be smaller or larger than territorially defined nation-states.” Discussing the example of French society that prohibits Muslim headscarves, Benhabib writes that learning must happen on both sides. On the one hand, the Muslim girls must understand the French demand to respect plurality and protect individual autonomy. On the other hand, the French authorities must listen to the girls for whom  wearing the scarves is increasingly less a religious act of absolute obedience and has become, instead, a performance of cultural defiance, identity, and politicization. The French establishment needs to learn not to stigmatize those who choose to identify religiously. And the Muslim community in France must learn to give justifications for their actions that accord with “good reasons in the public sphere.” Where this leaves fundamentalist practitioners of any religion, however, is unclear. 

Following Arendt, Benhabib maintains that politics happens in bounded and meaningful communities where people act and speak in a public world where their actions matter. And yet, at the same time, Benhabib, imagines the coming-into-being of a global cosmopolitan order. It is in this productive conflict between bounded communities of power and meaning with cosmopolitan orders that “another cosmopolitanism” can emerge. In this sense, cosmopolitanism is never a single, international order that overwhelms national and local communities. Rather, cosmopolitanism as Benhabib imagines it, is an elastic and never frictionless emergence of competing local, national, and global norms. 

To learn more about Benhabib’s version of cosmopolitanism, take a look at her book Another Cosmopolitanism.  And come here her speak at Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralist Politics.