Transnational Justice and Democracy: Overcoming Three Dogmas of Political Theory

Abstract

The title of my contribution seems to signal a tension, indeed virtually a contradiction, in a number of respects. Democracy is generally understood as a form of a political organization and government in which, through general and public participatory procedures, a sufficiently legitimate political will is formed that acquires the force of law. Justice, by contrast, appears (at least in the eyes of many theorists of democracy) to be a value external to this context that is understood not so much as connected with procedures of “input” or “throughput” legitimation but instead as a concept oriented to “outputs” or outcomes. At times, justice is even understood—alluding to Plato—as an otherworldly idea, which, when transported into the “cave” of everyday life, only causes trouble and ends up as an undemocratic elite project.¹ In methodological terms, too, this difference is sometimes marked by contrasting a “worldly” form of political thought with “abstract” and otherworldly philosophical reflection on justice.²

I presented earlier versions of this contribution for discussion at the conference of the Deutsche Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft in Kiel in September 2009, at the concluding conference of the research project on “Transnational Justice and Democracy” of the Frankfurt Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” in September 2010, at the Recon Workshop on “The European Political Order: Stateless but Democratic and Just?” in Oslo in September/October 2010, at the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Boston in December 2010, in the colloquium on Political Theory in Frankfurt in January 2011, and in the Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy of University College London in February 2011. I owe special thanks to the members of the aforementioned Cluster of Excellence research project and to those who commented on the paper on each of these occasions, especially, Jürgen Neyer, Klaus Schlichte, Nicole Deitelhoff, Klaus Dieter Wolf, Ayelet Banai, Rainer Schmalz-Bruns, Erik O. Eriksen, John Erik Fossum, Kjartan Koch Mikalsen, Daniel Gaus, Ken Baynes, Seyla Benhabib, Stefan Gosepath, Franziska Dübgen, Christian Volk, Dorothea Gädeke, Enrico Zoffoli, George Letsas, and John Tasioulas. For a particularly close reading of the penultimate version and important advice, I am grateful to Julian Culp and Peter Niesen.