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In The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, I suggested that international law began in the 1860’s as part of liberal entrenchment in Europe as the clouds of nationalism, racism and socialism were rising in the political horizon. It began as a project of practicalmen, attorneys and lawyers active in politics and parliament, and not out of philosophical contemplation or system-construction. University professors were involved, but these were professors of something that was seen more as a craft than a science. What they aimed at was to "civilize" the behaviour of their nations, but also the colonies, and to do this by coordinating liberal legislative reform in Europe, by supporting formal empire in the colonies, and by doing all this as part of a set of cosmopolitan legal projects they grouped into their "international law" (Droit international, diritto internazionale, Völkerrecht). ...
Europe’s reaction to the recent upheavals in North Africa clearly exposed one thing: The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), including its Security and Defence branch (CSDP), were steamrolled by a multitude of overtly national policies. The resulting cacophony of views made a mockery of the aspiration to present a united European position to external players. It also thwarts the claim of the EU being a more credible security actor in the wake of the Lisbon Treaty reforms. While commentators have moaned about a CFSP and CSDP ‘fatigue’ for quite some time now, the likelihood that what used to be the most dynamic EU policy field of the last decade will enter a period of prolonged hibernation never seemed as high...
At least since the 1980s, a scholarly debate on the very meaning of security has structured the field of (Critical) Security Studies to a large extent (see Working Paper #1). Today, many new concept such as human security and societal security are prominent anchors in academic and political debates directing our attention to the non-military aspects of security, in particular to the manifold insecurities people (and not only the state) face. The call for energy security is one prominent example...
Guerillas win as long as they do not lose, and government forces lose as long as they do not win. In Afghanistan, this adage holds, once again, true. Western civilian and military leaders want us to believe that insurgents and criminals are running out of options. Indeed, after much initial stuttering, NATO has transformed into a veritable counter-insurgency machine, with the United States shouldering most of the burden. Casualties among the Taliban and other enemies of NATO are enormous. Enormous, too, is the coalition of NATO and Afghan troops, approaching half a million soldiers and militia-types.
Based on Foucault’s analysis of German Neoliberalism and his thesis of ambiguity, the following paper draws a two-level distinction between individual and regulatory ethics. The individual ethics level – which has received surprisingly little attention – contains the Christian foundation of values and the liberal-Kantian heritage of so called Ordoliberalism – as one variety of neoliberalism. The regulatory or formal-institutional ethics level on the contrary refers to the ordoliberal framework of a socio-economic order. By differentiating these two levels of ethics incorporated in German Neoliberalism, it is feasible to distinguish dissimilar varieties of neoliberalism and to link Ordoliberalism to modern economic ethics. Furthermore, it allows a revision of the dominant reception of Ordoliberalism which focuses solely on the formal-institutional level while mainly neglecting the individual ethics level.
The past thirty years have seen dramatic changes to the character of state membership regimes in which practices of easing access to membership for resident non-citizens, extending the franchise to expatriate citizens as well as, albeit in typically more limited ways, to resident non-citizens and an increasing toleration of dual nationality have become widespread. These processes of democratic inclusion, while variously motivated, represent an important trend in the contemporary political order in which we can discern two distinct shifts. The first concerns membership as a status and is characterised in terms of the movement from a simple distinction between single-nationality citizens and single-nationality aliens to a more complex structure of state membership in which we also find dual nationals and denizens (Baubock, 2007a:2395-6). The second shift relates to voting rights and is marked by the movement from the requirement that voting rights are grounded in both citizenship and residence to the relaxing of the joint character of this requirement such that citizenship or residence now increasingly serve as a basis for, at least partial, enfranchisement. In the light of these transformations, it is unsurprising that normative engagement with transnational citizenship – conceived in terms of the enjoyment of membership statuses in two (or more) states – has focused on the issues of access to, and maintenance of, national citizenship, on the one hand, and entitlement to voting rights, on the other hand.
Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam is a multicultural province within a multicultural state. Hence, its political leaders not only face the need to integrate ethnic and cultural diversity into a regional framework, but also have to define Aceh’s role within the Indonesian nation. During its violent past which was characterized by exploitation and military oppression, there were good reasons to emphasize sameness over diversity and to build up the consciousness of a unified Acehnese identity. From both an emic and an etic perspective, it is today widely accepted that there is such a thing as a homogeneous Acehnese culture which is rooted in a glorious, though troublesome, history of repression and rebellion and shaped by a strong Islamic piety. Even if it is true that Acehnese history has created a strong regional identity, it must not be forgotten that people living in this area belong to various ethnic and cultural groups and that they represent a rich variety of different cultures rather than simply a single homogeneous culture. As a matter of fact, the practises and discourses of Islam here also vary depending on the cultural background of the people. As elsewhere in Indonesia and beyond, world religions have to adapt to local customs, have to be appropriated by the local people, and have to be indigenized. This is the reason why adat still continues to play a role in every local context, even if it has been treated with suspicion in many parts of Indonesia since the Dutch colonial administration began using it as a counterforce against Islam in order to implement their divide-and-rule strategy. With this article, I wish to shed some light on the complexities of Acehnese culture, as it encompasses numerous very distinct local cultures and this reflects on the general significance of culture for the construction and reconstruction of post-tsunami Aceh.
The title I have chosen seems to signal a tension, even a contradiction, in a number of respects. Democracy appears to be a form of political organisation and government in which, through general and public participatory procedures, a sufficiently legitimate political will is formed which acquires the force of law. Justice, by contrast, appears to be a value external to this context which is not so much linked to procedures of “input” or “throughput” legitimation but is understood instead as an output- or outcome-oriented concept. At times, justice is even understood as an otherworldly idea which, when transported into the Platonic cave, merely causes trouble and ends up as an undemocratic elite project. In methodological terms, too, this difference is sometimes signalled in terms of a contrast between a form of “worldly” political thought and “abstract” and otherworldly philosophical reflection on justice. In my view, we are bound to talk past the issues to be discussed under the heading “transnational justice and democracy” unless we first root out false dichotomies such as the ones mentioned. My thesis will be that justice must be “secularised” or “grounded” both with regard to how we understand it and to its application to relations beyond the state.
It has become commonplace to say that, in the past, international governance has been legitimated mainly, if not exclusively, by its welfare-enhancing ‘output’. There has been very little research, however, on the history of legitimating international governance by its output to validate this point. In this essay I begin to address this gap by inquiring into the origins of output-oriented strategies for legitimating international organizations. Scrutinizing the programmatic literature on international organizations from the early 20th century, I illustrate how a new and distinctive account of technocratic legitimation emerged and in the 1920s separated from other types of liberal internationalism. My inquiry, centring on the works of James Arthur Salter, David Mitrany, Paul S. Reinsch and Pitman B. Potter, explores their respective conceptions of ‘good functional governance’, executed by a non-political international technocracy. Their account is explicitly pitched against a notion of ‘international politics’, perceived as violent, polarizing, and irrational. The emergence of such a technocratic legitimation of international governance, I submit, needs to be seen in the context of societal modernization and bureaucratization that unfolded in the first half of the 20th century. I also highlight how in this account the material output of governance is intimately linked to the virtues of the organizational form that brings it about.