Liberalism’s All-inclusive Promise of Freedom and its Illiberal Effects: A Critique of the Concept of Globalization

The narrative of globalization is twofold: it refers to the hope for the export of democratic state forms and values from the Western world to the states of the so-called global south; it also refers to the aim of worldwide economic growth and extension of capitalist ways of production and consumption. But paradigmatic cases of action of democratic liberal states in international politics throw a twilight on this double hope. In certain cases, aggressive interventions of Western democratic states are legitimized using precisely the norms of non-intervention that claim universal validity, but turn out to follow an agenda of particular interests of economy and power. This article argues that these universal norms are not contingently transgressed, but in light of the second paradigm of globalization—of the economic spread of market relations—the process of self-constitution of democratic states here takes not a self-limiting, but an aggressive and exclusive turn. In addition, the so-called ‘new wars’ and ‘failed states’ (apparently opposing phenomena to the international agency of democratic and liberal Western states) show surprising parallels to late modern democratic liberal society. The ‘management of fear’ typical of these political situations aims at a regularization, through internalized habits and attitudes, of the population—including their agreement to the terror regime. In light of these considerations, the relationship between the aims of global growth and global democratization seems highly ambiguous. It is considered to be a distinguishing mark of modern and democratic societies that they limit the use of violence by the state as a means to enforce its authority. Deliberative processes, practices and institutions limit and control as self-government the exercise of the monopoly of power of the state. Thus, democratic government is a continuing self-constitution. Violence/power is used only as counter-violence outwards to defend against outer threats—a use that is in turn controlled by the governmental measuring of its proportionality. The narrative of globalization claims, on the one hand, the substitution of this dichotomy of outside and inside with an extension of the intrastate nonvioConstanze Demuth, Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) OpenAccess. © 2018 Constanze Demuth, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110492415-006 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/27/19 8:25 PM lent structures, resulting in an increasingly peaceful cooperation of democratic states. On the other hand, it also refers to the spread of capitalist forms of production to a ‘world market’ and the connected economic regulation of social order beyond the borders of nation states. This view is not without a teleology —in fact, it postulates a progress of the political structures of the world including the global south, directed towards peaceful and evermore rational forms of organization of capitalist democracies. Nevertheless, there are political phenomena which invite us to question this apparently evident narrative, especially in the periphery of the core states of democratic liberalism. They prove wrong the assumption that prosperity and democracy for all are the beckoning aim of the global integration of economies; as if the realization of this aim posed only minor applicatory problems,which could be easily overcome. For these cases show the acceptance and relevance of national borders diminishing without the expected result of peaceful cosmopolitism. Instead, relations of power spread, are restructured and newly established; the disadvantage of the global south deepened and not remedied. A sketch of a critique of theories of democratic peace In order to investigate this thesis further, let’s start with a critical look at the basic assumptions of the so-called ‘theory of democratic peace’ (Geis / Müller / Schörnig 2010). According to this theory, the liberal states have incorporated higher normative demands—specifically norms claiming universal validity— than undemocratic states. They internationally codified these norms, for instance in International Humanitarian Law. The theory of democratic peace doubles this observation with a hypothesis: that democratic states, with their ambitious ideals of human rights and universal values, fight fewer wars than undemocratic ones. Different authors, such as Yves Winter, Anna Geis, Oliver Eberl and others, have shown that this correlation doesn’t hold up to the test. In fact, democratic states fight fewer wars with other democratic states, but more wars with undemocratic ones, and in total about the same amount. In addition and maybe even more significantly, the standards of conduct of war of the former (for instance, with regard to the protection of civilians or of prisoners of war) are not higher; that is, the legal, respectively moral commitment to universal norms neither improves the quality nor the quantity of military conduct of democratic states. 64 Constanze Demuth Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/27/19 8:25 PM How can we account for the failure of this hypothesis? Without a doubt, principles that claim universal validity are the mirror of everyday life of the Western world, which incorporates the respect of the other as other into its practices. It is increasingly transformed into the political structures and institutions of liberal and democratic states. The codified and institutionalized ideal of the participation and respect of everybody, including the marginalized and minoritized, requires the ongoing democratic process of self-constitution of the community as community. This process takes place in practices of the deliberation and participation of potentially everybody. This normative commitment to processual allinclusion has, by definition, global applicability. Internationally, this claim finds its codification in the principle of non-intervention of International Humanitarian Law. But the normative level is not only (as theories of democratic peace claim) guiding for an increasing degree and extension of global democratization and peaceful cooperation. It is precisely the incorporation of universal claims that creates a new function of legitimatizing aggression against non-democratic states. Liberalism has an aggressive aspect that annuls precisely these standards, even while invoking them. Oliver Eberl even spots a ‘new liberal antipluralism’ (Eberl 2016, p. 364, my transl.). He considers it as a successor of Christianization and colonization. Internationally, the democratic practice of self-constitution is mediated by the construction of an image of the undemocratic other, irrational and dangerous. This construction works by the utilization and, at the same time, transgression of norms with universal claims (such as the abovementioned International Humanitarian Law of non-intervention). These are reformulated and transformed into an instrument of rule and power. The reconstitution and self-affirmation of the Western states as democratic here takes place precisely through this exclusion. The history of the term ‘rogue state’, coined by George W. Bush, exemplifies how the pretext of protective motives according to international laws can be turned into a function of the enforcement of power interests. Indeed, the acceptance and relevance of national borders is decreasing under the democratic pretext of the increase of processual self-government. But this democratic stance is coupled with the conception of a peaceful, global economic cooperation launched by the democratic states of the Western world. This second aspect transforms the very meaning of the processual reconstitution of liberal states. The result is a paradigm of cooperation in the terms of market rationality that raises doubts about the presumed effect of democratization and extension of nonviolent relations of globalization. Globalization, here, turns out not to lead to increasingly homogenous cosmopolitanism via all-inclusive political practices. For the universal norms that correspond to the democratic princiLiberalism’s All-inclusive Promise of Freedom and its Illiberal Effects 65 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/27/19 8:25 PM ple are utilized as a legitimization of exclusion, oppression and violence motivated by vested interests that they help to veil. The incorporation of these universal principles into the political structures and institutions of liberal and democratic states brings about its own tendency to repress and oppress, which has to be reflected and criticized. In late capitalism, the economistic interpretation of the democratic ideals of equality and participation of all is a very influential one. Thus, the fight for power on the one hand and the fight for legitimization on the other become blurred. The claim to all-inclusion implies here the utilization of the contribution of all and its own radicalized exclusion.Whatever is detracted from this utilization is excluded; it is first imagined as wholly other, and is then imagined on all conceptual levels to be excluded from humanity and rationality as such. This creates the impossibility of the conception of individual and collective ‘agents’ to whom the rules of armed conflict and the right to autonomous self-government do not apply. ‘New Wars’ and ‘Failed States’—cases of dysfunctional state capacity or extreme examples of neoliberal forms of regulation? I now want to take a look at the so-called ‘New Wars’ and their relation to globalization. New Wars are usually considered as a peripheral phenomenon of the globalized world—a form of war activity turned completely irregular. Theories of international politics tend to depict these phenomena as dysfunctional exceptions in contrast to the democratic state capacity with ambitious norms. But this account overlooks or even veils the exemplary character of New Wars within the o