A Cosmopolitical Manifesto
Beck, Ulrich
IT WAS a little more than 150 years ago that the transition from the feudal order to the democratic nation-state was debated in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt during the German Revolution. Today...
...Still, the difficulties are enormous...
...This transition will not happen on its own...
...With free trade in commodities, the problem has now become a global one, and this is only the beginning...
...But its time has come...
...Although in the context of democratically constituted national politics, even the refusal to make decisions requires an appearance of legitimacy, far-reaching decisions that lack any sort of democratic legitimacy are commonly made in the apparently non-political transnational context...
...In other words, they will have to fight for the autonomy of a cosmopolitan ethics and politics in their respective national cultural milieux...
...The power of global parties is not only measured by what will be, obviously, their initially small membership and vote count...
...But how can transnational parties engage themselves in the so-called internal affairs of so-called other countries...
...Cosmopolitan parties will not only have to endure and cope with these disagreements internally, they will also have to summon up the strength to resist movements for renationalization...
...These reactions do not indicate a failure of the multicultural experiment...
...second, they would put global questions squarely at the center of their political imagination, and their programs for action would aim always at a reform of national political systems so that they could address these questions...
...If the idea of a transnational democracy is to achieve political shape and power, a new political subject will have to be brought into being: the transnational party of global citizens...
...They dismantle their old bureaucratic hierarchies and organize themselves instead as flexible networks...
...Let us ask concretely: why has there never been a European referendum about introducing the Euro...
...third and finally, they would be organized as multinational parties, cosmopolitan movements of French, North American, Polish, German, Japanese, Chinese, or South African origins, interconnected in the various niches of global society...
...What is needed is the exact opposite of neoliberal deconstruction: strong states that can enforce the transnational regulation of markets domestically and externally...
...they would be active here as well as there...
...And yet one may say: the development of a pluralist world citizenry is paradoxically pushed forward by the tail winds of global capitalism...
...or 3) nationally anchored cosmopolitan parties, which would activate national publics, still largely cut off from one another, for transnational arguments...
...There is a new dialectic of the global and the local that is not easy to accommodate in national politics...
...Why so...
...The response is obvious: it would be rejected...
...For in pursuit of his self-interest, the capitalist has already learned how to think and act in transnational contexts, while the citizen still thinks and acts in the categories of the nation-state...
...And how can he/she/they legitimately do this...
...The first wave of national deregulation requires a second wave of transnational regulation...
...In the final instance the question of how cosmopolitan parties can be made possible and powerful will find an answer only in the political space where it properly belongs...
...But there are other ways to organize globally, and corporations show us how...
...How can this be done...
...ULRICH BECK is the author of A Reinvention of Politics...
...For just that purpose the new political subject is necessary: cosmopolitan parties that represent transnational matters transnationally, but do so within the political arenas of nation-states...
...In recent years densely regulated industries have been deregulated: telecommunications, energy, food, and finance...
...The idea is as unrealistic as the demand for national democracy was in 1848...
...The need to invent and negotiate the new rules makes globalization a focus of conflict not only in politics and the economy, but also in the daily lives of people around the world...
...For they will put all the other parties under pressure to address transnational issues in democratic ways...
...The rank and file of global parties, the "global citizenry" in its various national colors, composed of multiple branches, should not be confused with a global managerial class...
...There will be no more democracy in Europe—unless it is a transnationally enhanced democracy...
...For the European Union does not meet the democratic requirements for membership...
...Therefore they can only exist, programmatically and organizationally, in a plural mode—as national, global movements, as parties for global citizens...
...Unless we experiment with such new forms of democracy—beyond the nation-state 54 • DISSENT / Winter 1999 but still focused on the national parliaments that are the centers of democracy—we are likely to find ourselves in a postpolitical era of high technocracy...
...For only a strong Europe can spell out the old European idea of democracy for a new global era...
...Introducing the Euro and then sounding the retreat to the old nation-state, as many Europeans are doing now, jeopardizes the whole experiment...
...Crucial questions are raised by Europe's experience with mad-cow disease and again by financial crises like those of Asia today: Who can set binding norms for nation-states while bypassing their political processes...
...Especially after monetary union has been achieved, Europe must be strengthened with new political ideas and institutions...
...It is an experiment, and it must find a practical answer...
...Where are the voters that cosmopolitan parties can address and represent...
...DISSENT / Winter 1999 • 55...
...2) international regimes: strong regulatory authorities that act independently of national democratic governments...
...Imagine that it has become possible for British, Polish, or Italian citizens to engage themselves in a German election campaign, as members of a European party active in all European states...
...New sources of conflict loom on the horizon: for example, efforts to establish global environmental or labor-market standards, where conflicts are even more difficult to handle because the issues are so sensitive politically...
...they would play nationstates one against the other...
...This is a perfect example of the dilemma of democracy in the age of globalization...
...No, they are also global in the sense of being down-to-earth, everyday problems in this locality, in this city, for this group...
...There is a well-founded suspicion that cosmopolitanism will turn out to be some version of Western petit-bourgeois morality inflated to megalomania, unless strong national-global parties bring about a radical change in the core countries of the West: from societies that claim to teach everyone how to behave to societies capable of learning from others...
...These kinds of disagreements will increase, the greater the contrast of cultural backgrounds, wealth, and political regimes, across Africa, South America, and Asia...
...Coordination doesn't only operate top-down, but horizontally and across boundaries...
...We will have to distinguish between global capitalists and global citizens...
...This change will revalue what was devalued during the 1980s: the state and politics...
...Three scenarios are possible (they are not mutually exclusive): 1) cosmopolitan window-dressing: transnational politics as a way of pursuing national interests...
...Turning back the clock to national democracy is sheer illusion...
...This essay originally appeared in Die Zeit, July 16, 1998...
...Cosmopolitan parties can be important and influential even if they are initially capable only of mobilizing relatively small numbers of men and women...
...Today we have to begin a debate on the transition from the nation-state to a transnational and cosmopolitan democracy...
...IS THIS cloud-cuckoo-land...
...It is important to ask early and self-critically: who is going to decide which values come to be considered (sacred or secular) cosmopolitan values...
...Some political theorists answer yes, and they discuss a variety of models that would break up the spatial paradigm of parliamentary democracy in a transnational manner...
...Because France, Germany, Britain, and all the others no longer live up to the membership requirements...
...How can struggles for regulation be politically organized...
...Or to put it another way: can there be some kind of transnational procedural legitimation...
...They would be "cosmopolitan parties" in three different ways: first, their values and goals would be shaped with reference to humanist traditions common to all cultures and religions—in contrast to national parties that refer themselves only to national traditions and solidarities...
...Cosmopolitan parties would be the first actors in party politics to copy the strategies of corporations and break out of the territorial trap of the nation-state...
...Connection to the Internet does not by itself generate global citizens...
...Imagine that the European Union (EU) itself applied for membership in the European Union...
...they only suggest that all of us, all modern nation-states, have finally entered the turbulence of global society...
...To some extent this is already foreseeable...
...We must avoid any glorification of the multiethnic global society...
...They would have a right to "meddle" in this way, because in German election campaigns today European and even gloDISSENT / Winter 1999 53 bal political issues are debated, albeit in a national disguise...
...But who might be the supporters of such a cosmopolitan movement for the expansion of democracy...
...It can be adequately presented and resolved only in a transnational context...
...Alongside tolerance and the enjoyment of diversity grow exclusion and xenophobia...
...Ecological crises, migration and xenophobia, crime, financial flows, tax evasion, job flight, poverty and justice, the future of the welfare state, and retirement pensions—all these are global problems, and not only in the sense that they have grown too big for the national political frame...
...Imagine a meeting of global parties: this should be an Olympic Games of contrasting opinions and strong arguments that attracts the attention of global mass media and begins to shape a global public...
...It is in the metropoles, the global cities, where a postnational understanding of politics, responsibility, the state, justice, arts, science, and public exchange might emerge—and where transnational parties might find support...
...The world does not want global offices and bureaucrats...
...Differences between the United States and the European Union with regard to the quality and safety of food products, for example, can hardly be reconciled...
...States and parties can learn to build a network, a transnationally united, but decentralized order...
...Translated from the German by Silvia Baubock...
...Try this welltested party slogan: let's learn from the economy, let's learn to win...
...Their power resides rather in the legitimacy of their voice even when they speak only for a dwindling or persecuted minority...
...To what extent it will actually happen in the future is, however, an empirically and politically contingent question...
...This would have raised the level of Europe's politics by creating a European public to address a truly European theme...
...It is less like a melting pot and more like a salad bowl in which cultural identities coexist with and against one another in a colorful and conflictual way...
...Cosmopolitans of all countries, unite...
...As members, they don't deserve to be members: more and more decisions are taken autonomously by the Union, not democratically determined but merely executed by the member states...
...Global competition has thereby been unleashed and has led to conflicts among national authorities struggling to establish a normative regime...
...This question applies most immediately to Europe...
...This story can be given a further twist: imagine that a few weeks after this rejection, all the member states of the EU are notified that the EU unfortunately has to cancel their membership...
...They would compete with national parties in what are only apparently national conflicts about policy and power...
Vol. 46 • January 1999 • No. 1
