Between Political Liberalism and Postnational Cosmopolitanism-Toward an Alternative Theory (David Ingran, 2003)

Between Political Liberalism and Postnational Cosmopolitanism: Toward an Alternative Theoryof Human RightsAuthor(s): David IngramReviewed work(s):Source: Political Theory, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Jun., 2003), pp. 359-391Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3595680 .

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BETWEEN POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND POSTNATIONAL COSMOPOLITANISM Toward an Alternative Theory of Human Rights

DAVID INGRAM Loyola University, Chicago

It is well known thatRawls and Habermas propose differentstrategiesforjustifying and classify- ing human rights. The author argues that neither approach satisfies what he regards as threshold conditions of determinacy, rank ordering, and completeness that any enforceable system of human rights must possess. A related concern is that neither develops an adequate account of group rights, which the author argues fulfills subsidiary conditions for realizing human rights under specific conditions. This latter defect is especially serious in light of the different but equal roles that both subnational groups as well as supernational organizations play in bringing about a just global distribution of economic resources.

Keywords: Rawls; Habermas; rights; globalization; justice

The limits of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think. It is our weak- nesses, our vices, our prejudices, that shrink them.

J. J. Rousseau (The Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 12, par. 2)

This essay examines four criteria that any adequate theory of human rights must satisfy: universality, prescriptive determinacy, priority, and completeness. First, an adequate theory must articulate universal rights that any rationally self-interested and reasonably fair-minded person could accept, regard- less of cultural allegiance. Universality can designate either factual or potential agreement among reasonable people. I will argue that it should encompass potential agreement, where the potentiality in question does not preclude robust agreement on speciElc rights. Second, an adequate theory should articulate rights that are sufElciently deElned in order to be prescriptive and not merely regulative in some vague and general way. This follows from

AUTHOR 'SNOTE: The author is grateful to Stephen White, Jeff Flynn, and anonymous readers for their comments in revising this essay.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 31 No. 3, June 2003 359-391 DOI: 10.1177/0090591703251906 (C) 2003 Sage Publications

359



360 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2003

the concept of a human right as a legally enforceable claim that entitles those to whom it applies with some degree of fair warning. Such a requirement is compatible with the progressive determination of rights in accordance with their increasingly universal acceptance. Third, an adequate theory should distinguish basic from nonbasic rights, where basic rights are understood as guaranteeing the conditions necessary for the exercise of nonbasic rights. I argue that the distinction between basic and nonbasic rights ought not to be interpreted as privileging one category of rights (e.g., negative rights to act without interference) over other categories of rights (such as positive rights to capacities, resources, and opportunities for action). Finally, an adequate theory should be complete, in that it includes all categories of rights that are necessary for the full exercise of any human right. I argue that completeness is achieved only when liberal democratic rights are included among the schedule of basic human rights. These rights, in turn, imply cultural, social, and economic rights.

In working out the details of my position I will be referring to two main types of liberal theories: cosmopolitan theories that take individuals as the primary addressees of international law and political theories that take nations as the primary addressees. My reference point for the first kind of theory is the discourse ethical theory of law defended by Jurgen Habermas; my reference for the second kind is the political liberal theory advanced by John Rawls. These theories have much in common. Both depart from the liberal theory of international justice set forth in Kant's famous treatise, Perpetual Peace (1795); both agree that national sovereignty must be limited by respect for universal human rights and that differing peoples must be allowed to interpret these rights in accordance with their own particular political traditions, at least within limits. At the same time, they disagree about these limits, with Habermas affirming and Rawls denying the necessity of liberal democratic institutions for realizing a fully legitimate and stable system of rights. Although each of these theories has distinctive virtues, neither satisfactorily meets the four conditions of an adequate theory of rights as outlined above.

Part I begins with a discussion of the universality criterion. While Rawlsian political liberalism does an admirable job at establishing a factual basis for universal human rights, it does so by relinquishing prescriptive determinacy. By conceding that any international consensus on human rights must accommodate radically incommensurable understandings of such rights, it leaves the prescriptive meaning of rights overly vague and indeter- minate. In Part II, I argue that Habermasian discourse theory remedies this deficiency by establishing dialogue as a basis for negotiating cross-cultural differences over time. This theory justifies the potential for an ever-expand- ing agreement regarding the specific meaning and deeper rationale underly-



Ingram / ALTERNATIVE THEORY OF HUMAN RIGHTS 361

ing rights. Although this deeper agreement is postulated as an ideal goal to be achieved over time-hence its practical limitations as a basis for working out a universal schedule of rights in the present-it is a reasonable desideratum once we (1) abandon the-in my opinion, philosophically indefensible- assumption of cultural incommensurability informing Rawls's political liberalism and (2) accept the likelihood that global modernization will incline all cultures to liberalize and democratize. Despite its advantages, Habermasian discourse theory does not remedy all forms of prescriptive indeterminacy. In Parts III and IV, I argue that both this theory and its Rawlsian counterpart fail to establish an adequate criterion for distinguishing between basic and non-basic rights. While Rawls explicitly claims that human rights have priority over liberal (political and civil) rights and that the latter have priority over economic, social, and cultural rights, it is noteworthy that even Habermas's general reluctance to prioritize rights in this manner is open to doubt. I argue that the Rawlsian approach to ranking rights is unac- ceptable and defend an alternative ranking scheme that acknowledges the equal weight and complementarity of different categories of rights.

Failure to satisfy the fourth criterion by neglecting to include cultural rights among the completed system of human rights is often reflected in a neglect of group rights. In Part V, I argue that such neglect is unforgivable in light of the realities of our post-Westphalian world. Rawlsian political liberalism postulates the existence of closed, homogeneous nations in a way that explicitly brackets multicultural migration and diversity. To the extent that it acknowledges group rights at all, it is only within the context of illiberal undemocratic societies. Habermas's discourse theory fares little better, for even though it incorporates multicultural diversity into its theory of nationality and allows (however reluctantly) that group rights might realize individual rights within liberal democracy, it does not explain how this concession to groups can be reconciled with its own liberal individualistic assumptions-a reconciliation, I argue, that can be effectively defended in cases involving women, immigrants, and subnationalities. Part VI extends the critique of sovereignty and self-sufficiency to include the economic sphere. I argue that Rawlsian political liberalism especially succumbs to this critique, since its assumption of national economic sovereignty undermines any account of economic rights beyond those to subsistence and assistance. Habermas's discourse theory, by contrast, acknowledges the interdependency of states and urges stronger measures of global economic redistribution aimed at democratically empowering vulnerable sectors and communities within the world economy. However, it too underestimates the extent to which the basic structures of a global capitalist economy will have to be transformed, and its appeal to supranational organizations as the key to reform overlooks the




importance of subnational groups and communities in protecting local resources and habitats.

I. UNIVERSALITY

Of the two theories of international law we are using as our benchmark, it is political liberalism that seems most conducive to establishing a basis for rights that is truly universal. Political liberalism looks to factual commonali- ties between different national cultures in seeking its warrant for universal rights. It is therefore committed to tolerating wide disagreement with respect to specific economic and political institutions. Especially pertinent in light of recent events is Rawls's opinion that political liberalism must accommodate Islamic theocracies that do not treat all citizens equally and do not allow a spectrum of civil and political rights that is as extensive as that present in liberal democracies.

In his essay The Law of Peoples (LP),1 Rawls proposes to base international respect for human rights, just war principles, and principles of economic assistance vis-a-vis burdened nations on a political conception of mutual respect between "peoples," or societal groups unified by "common sympathies" and organized around territorial states. Accepting the idea that peoples, unlike the governments that act in their name (states in the technical sense), can be motivated by a sense of justice in dealing with other peoples rather than by sovereign self-interest, he sees no reason they should not be fully respected so long as they in turn respect basic human rights,2 refrain from expansionist policies, and institutionalize a conception of justice based upon reciprocal duties and the rule of law. Significantly, Rawls holds that even illiberal undemocratic nations that do not allow equal civil and political freedom and whose legal institutions embody a conception of justice that privileges one particular comprehensive conception of the common good over others (what he calls a "common good conception of justice" as distinct from a liberal, "political conception of justice") can satisfy minimum thresh- olds of decency sufficient for them to be recognized as legitimate by liberal peoples (LP, 64-65). Consonant with this conception of legitimacy, he maintains that within illiberal undemocratic states human rights can be assigned to persons as members of subgroups and that subgroups can be accorded unequal freedoms as required by the common good (LP, 66). In his opinion, legitimacy-if not full justice-is maintained to the degree that minority groups are tolerated, dissenting groups are adequately responded to, and each group is fairly represented in a consultation hierarchy (LP, 69).3 Seen from the vantage point of economic justice, a minimally just Rawlsian world




would also tolerate decent societies that choose not to provide state-funded services or to promote the kind of socioeconomic equality normally thought to be essential to maintaining a healthy democracy. Hence, it would tolerate large differences in economic well-being within and between well-ordered states.

Now, commentators frequently note the discontinuity between Rawls's earlier theory of justice, including his more recent account of political liberalism, and his justification of a Law of Peoples.4 The earlier theory's defense of a liberal, democratic conception of justice, which takes the freedom and equality of individuals as central to its vision of a well-ordered and stable legal regime, seems to have been abandoned in the essay on international law. Indeed, Rawls himself is quite explicit on this point. Once we understand that a Law of Peoples must encompass illiberal undemocratic as well as liberal democratic societies, the concept of what is reasonable to expect in the way of agreement on basic human rights must be considerably weakened. In his opinion, decent and not altogether unreasonable people living in illiberal, non-democratic societies will disagree about the superiority of liberal democratic schemes of justice just as reasonable people living in liberal democratic societies will disagree about the superiority of specific interpretations of liberal democracy or the superiority of specific comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines. Therefore, it would be unreasonable- intolerant and illiberal-for liberal democratic peoples to impose their basic institutional structures on these other societies as a prerequisite for mutually advantageous cooperation. Furthermore, the mere fact that these other societies do not extend equal political rights to all their members is no argument against respecting them as equals in a community of societies, since many illiberal hierarchical organizations, such as churches and universities, are treated as equals by more liberal, egalitarian groups (LP, 69).

Although Rawls acknowledges that his concession to non-liberal, non- democratic nations marks a deviation from his earlier theory, he insists that his conception of international law is in some respects an extension of it. The earlier, individual-centered theory attempted to reconstruct a distinctly Kantian account of justice for liberal democracies by using the representa- tional device of an original position in which hypothetical contractors agree on principles of justice without knowing specific details about themselves or their society.5 The later-political liberal-theory, by contrast, sought to show that a more general set of liberal principles were free standing of any comprehensive philosophical doctrine-including Kantian Doctrine-and so could function as a point of convergence for reasonable citizens of liberal democracies holding conflicting comprehensive metaphysical and epistemological doctrines.6




The argument in support of a Law of Peoples also appeals to the original position and ideas associated with political liberalism. The latter idea and its correlative notions of reasonableness and of overlapping consensus are especially crucial. For example, Rawls argues that the free exercise of reason leads to an irreducible plurality of comprehensive doctrines, so that no liberal democratic regime should impose a comprehensive conception of the good on its citizens in the way that an illiberal society might reasonably do. At the same time, he notes that the reasonable comprehensive doctrines of persons inhabiting liberal democracies will at least overlap in their support of a liberal democratic constitution for the right reasons-reasons of deep moral principle-even if they do not happen to share the same reasons. LP deploys a similar line of argument. Reasonable peoples cannot but disagree on comprehensive doctrines, and so some of them will prefer liberal democratic institutions, others not. However, all decent peoples can appeal to their specific moral philosophies in consenting to basic articles of international justice, which do not depend on any particular comprehensive doctrine, and so will overlap on these strictly political points (LP, 16, 18).

Now, the extension of devices such as the original position and overlapping consensus beyond the domestic, liberal democratic setting to the international arena had already been proposed by Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971) but did not go much beyond considerations pertaining to just war doctrine.7 It was left to others to extend these Rawlsian ideas to areas of international justice touching on economic redistribution and immigration.8 LP acknowledges these applications but extends the original contractarian idea in a way that is fundamentally different from them. Instead of populating his global original position with cosmopolitan contractors seeking fair terms of cooperation for free and equal individuals (heads of households), Rawls pop- ulates it with contractors seeking fair terms of cooperation for free and equal nations.9

Rawls's application of the social contractarian model to peoples rather than individuals is also reflected in his subtle reinterpretation of what counts as "reasonable." In Political Liberalism (PL) individuals are described as reasonable who seek fair terms of cooperation as free and equal. In LP inhabitants of consultation hierarchies who seek fair terms of cooperation are said to be decent-if not fully reasonable and just-in their treatment of their fellow citizens, while as peoples relating equally to other peoples they are character- ized as fully reasonable (LP, 74, 83, 87).

In sum, Rawls's theory of international justice follows from his desire to extend the idea of a real social contract as far as reasonably possible. This realist-or pragmatist-decision to achieve global stability by being maximally inclusive privileges toleration of minimally decent but otherwise illib-




eral and undemocratic states. This extension of political liberalism presumes that any international consensus on rights and economic justice will at best be rather thin and overlapping. It will be thin because the content agreed upon will perforce be very general and all encompassing. It will be overlapping because the (assumed) cultural insularity and economic self-sufficiency of distinct peoples make agreement on a thicker, more comprehensive political- economic culture virtually impossible.

II. PRESCRIPTIVE DETERMINACY

This last fact underscores what Habermas perceives to be a serious weak- ness in political liberalism. The relative superficiality of a theory of rights based on an overlapping consensus deprives the theory of prescriptive force. This defect, in turn, is closely wedded to the inability of an overlapping consensus to distinguish a stable agreement based on moral trust from an unstable, modus vivendi based on strategic expediency.

The very concept of an overlapping consensus suggests limits to what sorts of public reasons might be appropriate in official, governmental con- texts. In a reasonable, pluralistic world, persons will typically have different-possibly conflicting-reasons for agreeing on abstract principles of justice. These non-shareable reasons, which stem from particular religious, ethical, and legal traditions, will also inform concrete interpretations of such principles, as expressed in definite legal and political institutions. Hence, a decent illiberal society will interpret the specific content of basic human rights differently than a liberal one. Now, according to Rawls, leaders of liberal democracies who act reasonably and civilly will recognize that reasonable pluralism among peoples imposes limits on the kinds of reasons they can bring to bear in discussing rights and other principles of justice with leaders of illiberal societies. In reasoning with them, they will not rely mainly on the non-shareable features of their specifically liberal doctrines, even though it is precisely these doctrines that ground their belief in the deeper truth of these rights and principles in the first place (LP, 171). In other words, when leaders of liberal democracies discuss human rights with leaders of decent but illiberal hierarchies, they will not rely mainly on their own society's liberal democratic interpretation of rights.

Notice that private citizens who do not officially represent their nation (and do not wield the power to sanction) are not bound by such considerations of public civility and public reason. Citizens of a liberal democracy can try to persuade private citizens of an illiberal hierarchy to change their understanding of basic rights through informal arguments of a non-official nature that do




appeal to reasons held as true in accordance with deeper philosophical principles (LP, 84). Whether these reasons succeed in persuading the citizens of an illiberal hierarchy to adopt a liberal democratic interpretation of rights will depend on the extent to which the diverse comprehensive doctrines held by interlocutors on both sides happen to agree on the relevant points. But whether they happen to agree or not is irrelevant to deciding the civility of government officials arguing in this manner. Rawls insists that officials of liberal democracies should neither offer incentives nor appeal to their deepest or most comprehensive principles in persuading their illiberal, undemocratic counterparts to adapt liberal democratic rights (LP, 84-85). Indeed, to do so would be philosophically futile, since, according to Rawls (and contrary to Habermas), a liberal democratic interpretation of rights is not implied (logi- cally or otherwise) by a strictly political conception ofjustice.10 So given reasonable pluralism among rights interpretations at the international level, Rawls's ideal of public reason will effectively shield illiberal consultation hierarchies from officially authorized pressures to liberalize and democratize. This would not only be bad for people inhabiting illiberal and undemocratic Middle Eastern regimes, but it would be bad for everyone, since Islamic fundamentalism and its violent offshoots may well have arisen partly in reaction to Western complicity in propping up corrupt authoritarian and anti-egalitarian governments.

There is another hitch to this principle of tolerance that threatens to unravel the stability and trustworthiness of international covenants. Rawls's conception of international reasonableness, whose ideal of public reason involves accepting a non-aggressive government's consent to basic rights without demanding deeper accountability with respect to the moral duties and ideas ofjustice underlying the consent given, seems unreasonable in light of the aim of agreement, which is to secure trust between peoples built on shared norms. The mere existence of an overlapping consensus among peoples who subscribe to what Rawls himself takes to be potentially "incommensurable" moral doctrinesT" does not alone establish its reasonableness. Indeed, as Habermas had insisted in his earlier debate with Rawls,12 there is no way of knowing whether the-otherwise incommensurable-doctrines that converge toward this consensus are minimally decent, short of their being justified in an inclusive, cross-cultural dialogue. For the mere fact that I observe that other persons agree to the same principles I endorse-and for reasons that I can, if at all, barely fathom-would not entitle me to infer that their reasons were moral reasons, let alone fully reasonable (i.e., justifiable) ones (The Inclusion of the Other [IO], 62-63,90-91). In short, unless Rawlsian overlapping consensus on human rights implicates more than incommensu-




rable moral rationales, that is, unless it also implicates at some deeper level consensus on substantive core norms, moral duties, and ideals of justice, there will be no way of knowing whether the agreement in question was not entered into for irrational or strategic reasons. Leaving aside the fact that trustworthy commitments must ultimately be cemented in deeds, without knowing that the reasons you (a citizen of an illiberal Islamic theocracy) and I (a citizen of a liberal democracy) agree are both deeply justifiable-and thus equally reliable and stable-for roughly the same reasons, I have no grounds for trusting you. For all I know, your religious faith in rights could be trumped by fundamentalist ardour; for all you know, my secular support of the same could be trumped by economic greed.

Of course, trust is seldom an all or nothing affair. Ongoing acts of non- aggression may suffice to maintain minimal levels of trust between ideologi- cally antagonistic peoples necessary for partial cooperation on pressing matters (witness, e.g., the immigration diplomacy between the United States and Cuba). Even the strong antagonism between the United States and its Euro- pean allies regarding the death penalty and the basic rights of children doesn't undermine robust levels of trust with respect to other rights issues. However, the general rule for securing complete trust and efficient cooperation on any pressing rights issue requires something like the following: instead of dis- agreeing on core norms in deference to tolerating ideological incommensurabilities or agreeing on such norms in a manner so general as to preclude further agreement on their prescriptive meaning and priority, we should rather insist on a fully inclusive and open dialogue aimed at achieving precisely this latter kind of agreement, which is the only way to forge a true consensus on basic human rights.

Certainly, achieving true consensus on basic rights is easier said than done. Once we abandon the presumption of incommensurability, different possibilities present themselves. Following Charles Taylor,13 we can imagine different legal forms realizing the same "norms of action." Initially these norms might be sustained by an overlapping consensus of relatively disparate background traditions of justification, so long as the consensus progressively evolves toward deeper mutual understanding. In the course of mutually trans- forming, interpenetrating, and enlarging one another in the manner suggested by a Gadamerian "fusion of horizons," disparate traditions can converge on substantive (determinate and prescriptive) norms. For instance, the anthropo- centric individualism of Western humanism and the cosmocentric ecologism of Eastern Reform Buddhism can mutually enlarge and elevate one another in supporting norms of nonviolence, individual responsibility, and democracy capable of combating predatory globalization. Conversely, it may be that




consensus on social norms (such as gender equality) will only come after sustained efforts of mutual understanding have transformed what otherwise appear to be "closed" dogmatic traditions. Ideally, however, the anthropocen- tric individualism associated with secular liberalization will be mitigated and transformed by the ecological communalism of more spiritual traditions.

Habermas's discourse theory of international law acknowledges the importance of mutual understanding in both reaching and refining consensus. Stable systems of law must be recognized as legitimate by those on whom they are imposed. As in political liberalism, legitimacy is here understood consensually: only those laws are fully legitimate that have the volun- tary support of those affected by them. The voluntariness of this support, however, must be based on the deeper reason, shared by everyone, that the law in question is truly impartial, meaning that everyone could have con- sented to it as advancing the interests of all equally. The counterfactual nature of the consent in question is closely tied to an ideal notion of reasonableness: consent is reasonable only when it follows from a maximally inclusive and fair conversation in which all relevant divisive assumptions-cultural, political, economic, or social-are openly criticized. The difference between this conception of reasonableness and Rawls's is subtle but momen- tous. Rawls's notion of reasonableness is one with his political liberalism: it is reasonable to tolerate-and not to criticize-comprehensive cultural, political, economic, and social doctrines that are factually incommensurable. It is reasonable to do this because we know that the free exercise of reason is as likely to lead to disagreement as to agreement, so that trenchant and unresolvable pluralism is a fact of reason. Furthermore, it is reasonable to predict in advance which disagreements are trenchant and unresolvable, for it is reasonable to avoid imposing uncivil expectations regarding, for instance, the capacity of Islamic fundamentalists and secular liberals to agree on equal rights for women.

The disagreement between Rawls and Habermas thus largely boils down to a disagreement about reasonableness. For Habermas, reasonableness imposes an ideal demand to criticize comprehensive assumptions in open and inclusive dialogue; indeed it stems from a comprehensive philosophical demand that agreement be created where none exists and that it be created autonomously, through the radical questioning, if need be, of all assumptions. Rational conviction is both egalitarian and deep; for genuine dialogue is distinguished from rhetorical manipulation by being motivated solely by reasons that would be accepted as true-grounded in deeper, comprehensive philosophical theories-by persons who speak to one another as free and equal moral subjects, unhindered by material inequality or ideological coercion.




III. COMPLETENESS

The discourse theory of rights is willing to sacrifice factual consensus on liberal democratic rights in the present on the expectation that such a consensus will emerge over time as dialogue between peoples is opened up and rational enlightenment spreads. The irrepressible modernization of all societies through globalization-their institutionalization of some form of market economy coupled with some form of bureaucratic administration-will likely force them to liberalize and democratize. Once that happens, a strongly prescriptive consensus on a liberal democratic interpretation of human rights will also likely emerge.

The modernization argument is controversial but perhaps less necessary to the discourse theory than Habermas realizes.'4 A more conceptually grounded argument of the sort Habermas provides in Between Facts and Norms (BFN) (1993) suffices just as well. Extrapolating from that argument, I will argue that human rights and liberal democratic rights are conceptually complementary: you can't have a fully realized institutionalization of the one without the other.

Another way to get at this completeness theorem is by recalling what I said earlier about toleration. Political liberalism-at least when divorced from its original liberal democratic application-provides a shaky basis for defending the principle of toleration. Political liberalism mandates toleration because (1) we seek the broadest consensus possible on basic rights and (2) we cannot, ex hypothesi, agree on the reasons for doing so. We must, in other words, tolerate each others' different reasons-and the cultural backgrounds that give rise to those reasons-in order to agree to live peaceably with one another. But toleration born of trenchant disagreement between incommensurable systems of thought provides no basis for mutual trust and cooperation. The religious wars in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bear this out. Despite their intense dislike for one another, Protestant and Catholic sects initially tolerated one another out of a purely Hobbesian fear of mutual destruction. The willingness to forgo total victory (unknown among today's apocalyptic suicidal terrorists) was based, however, on a fragile balance of power and on the perceived futility of converting the apostate- a prudential sentiment that still informs Locke's Letter concerning Tolera- tion (1685). Given the instability of this modus vivendi, liberals from Montesquieu to Rawls have argued that true toleration must rest on moral respect for the equal dignity and worth of each and every individual. But sometimes even this minimal respect is not enough, especially when those whom we tolerate are viewed as having an unfair political advantage over us. Here, toleration demands political justice, or the equal inclusion of each indi-




vidual (or group) in democratic deliberation and decision making. Because equal inclusion also touches on matters of substantive distributive justice, full tolerance will further require economic, social, political, and cultural equality. All of this follows from a thin but nonetheless comprehensive conception of a distinctly liberal good. In sum, tolerance of others is an evolving liberal democratic project that gradually substitutes trust based on justice for modus vivendi based on power.

This Kantian conception of tolerance, based on equal respect for autonomous individuals, is defended by Habermas in IO and The Postnational Con- stellation (PC)."5 Nationality, he notes, designates an artificially constructed locus of identity whose usefulness in struggles for liberation and democracy has long been surpassed by multicultural migrations and other features of globalization and has all too often justified illiberal forms of nationalism that suppress dissident minority groups and other subnationalities. Concomitant with this understanding of nationality as ideology is Habermas's belief that "popular sovereignty and [individual] human rights go hand in hand."'6 According to this view, rights devolve principally on individuals rather than groups, because it is individuals alone who generate legitimate moral and legal norms in the course of deliberating together as free and equal partici- pants in democratic dialogue. Finally, because Habermas believes that individual rights flourish only within liberal democracies, which in his view require relatively high levels of government welfare and socioeconomic equality, he insists that a minimally just world composed entirely of liberal democracies would (and should) tolerate much less inequality between nations than one not so composed.

Now, Habermas's discourse theory follows Rawlsian pragmatism in denying that universal human rights can be directly derived from a priori morality (natural law) since, like all legal rights, they too are "structured" as enforceable statutes that have been democratically processed-in this instance, through the auspices of the United Nations (10, 190-92). However, unlike its Rawlsian counterpart, it embeds itself in a comprehensive philosophy. It implies that the philosophical reason why such rights are legitimate is that they refer beyond the contingent moral reasons given in support of them by political agents (10, 191) to include the necessary and universal presupposi- tions of speech that condition socialization and normative integration. In speaking to one another, reasonable persons are obligated to recognize one another as free and equal. Because equality and autonomy are deeply embedded in our (communicative) nature, laws sanctioning rights cannot be bestowed upon citizens paternalistically without violating their own humanity as self-legislating rights bearers (10, 261). Hence, liberal democracy is not




simply one possible form a legitimate regime can take: it is the only one-and the only one, too, for any transnational federation that seeks to protect the fragile social democracies of member nation-states against the destructive impact of economic globalization (PC, 80-84, 120-26).

The very fact that countries like China now embrace the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights after having formerly denounced it as bour- geois ideology might be cited as evidence for Habermas's more speculative claims about the linguistically deep-seated nature of liberal humanism. But as he himself notes, if liberal democratic doctrines are as valid as he says they are, then they are valid in an ambiguous way that reflects their dual, moral- legal status; for their widespread acceptance as moral principles stands in stark contrast to their less-than-widespread embodiment in legal institutions. Here, comparison with human rights proves instructive. As we have seen, Habermas argues that human rights "to pursue one's private conception of the good" are universally valid only in the sense that (1) under conditions of fair, inclusive, and unlimited dialogue, all reasonable persons would accept them as morally binding and (2) their acceptance as such is but the first step toward full recognition of their legal legitimacy, which is an ongoing project whose completion awaits the establishment of a global democratic federation of liberal democracies.

What Habermas says about human rights can be said with slight modifica- tion about liberal rights associated with equal democratic participation. Habermas suggests that "political civil rights, specifically the rights of communication and participation, that safeguard the exercise of political autonomy" (I0, 259) are instrumentally justified as enabling conditions for liberal democracy (PC, 175-76). Since liberal democracy is the institutional realization of both the rule of law and the human condition (namely, the condition of a species that reproduces its moral and social being through communication), these "political civil rights" occupy an important niche in his scheme. Yet they are not privileged, for Habermas insists that human rights have an "intrinsic [i.e., purely moral] value" that applies to all individuals, no matter their political or civil status (10, 259-60). Despite their intrinsic moral content, the legal form they share with political and civil rights distinguishes them from moral rights in that they are merely permissive, imposing no corresponding duty on those who possess them other than the duty to allow their free exercise.

The question thus arises: is it more important to institute classical human rights before instituting "political civil" rights? Or does the very legitimacy of the former as legally enacted require instituting the latter first, in the institutional structure of the United Nations?




IV PRIORITY

Despite Habermas's insistence on the complementarity of private autonomy (subjective freedom to pursue one's personal conception of the good) and public autonomy (intersubjective freedom to participate in democratic deliberation), he provides no clear answer to this question. Nor does he tell us how "political civil rights" and "classical human rights" ought to be ranked with respect to economic, cultural, and social rights. Sometimes he seems to follow Rawls in privileging civil and political rights above economic, cultural, and social rights. The latter, which are mainly entitlements (positive rights) to enabling goods and capacities, are said by Habermas (following Rawls) to realize the fair value of "political civil" and "classical human" rights (cf. n. 19). Although Rawls expressly interprets "realizing the fair value of rights" to mean that economic rights, in particular, have less priority than the political and civil rights whose values they realize, Habermas does not-at least not in any obvious sense.

According to Habermas, the negative freedom to "pursue one's private conception of the good" without interference is meaningless apart from the positive freedom to be protected and supported in this endeavor by one's consociates (BFN, 41-42). In protecting the former (subjective) right, we are conceptually committed to a host of other rights, including rights to membership in equal standing and rights to due process. These basic categories of right-to (1) "the greatest possible measure of equal liberties that are mutually compatible," (2) equal membership (including freedom to emigrate and immigrate), and (3) free access to impartial courts-constitute an abstract legal code that must be interpreted. In the West, category (1) has been interpreted expansively-and some might say necessarily-to include "classic liberal rights to personal dignity; to life, liberty, and bodily integrity; to freedom of movement, freedom in the choice of one's vocation, property, the inviolability of one's home, and so on" (BFN, 125). Who initially interprets these rights in their most general and abstract form are the framers of consti- tutions acting on behalf of citizens, but the full prescriptive meaning and force of rights must be worked out among the citizens themselves and their elected representatives in political dialogue-hence the conceptual necessity for democratic rights. Without democratic legal enactment, the abstract categories of subjective right at best enable but do not restrict the legislator's autonomy (BFN, 128). Finally, Habermas concludes that citizens must have "equal opportunities to utilize" the four "absolutely justified categories" of civil rights mentioned above. These equal opportunities include "basic rights to the provision of living conditions that are socially, technologically, and ecologically safeguarded."




Habermas insists that this fifth category of rights "can be justified only in relative terms" with respect to the four "absolutely justifiable" categories of civil and political rights. This could mean either of two things: the fifth category of rights is first deduced from the other categories, in which case the latter are prior only in the logical order of justification, or the fifth category is less binding and imperative (less prior in the logical order of institutionalization).17 Although Habermas seems to be suggesting the equal priority ranking of all rights in a way that goes beyond Rawls-and there is nothing in his account of the peculiar moral universality underwriting human rights that limits their categorical scope-his assertion that the fifth category of rights "only serve(s) to guarantee the 'fair value' (Rawls); i.e., the actual conditions for the equal exercise of liberal and political rights" (PC, 187) suggests the second, Rawlsian meaning. Contrary to Rawls (and possibly Habermas), I will argue that at least some economic, cultural, and social rights are more than mere auxiliary goods and capacities that contingently realize the fair value of human, civil, and political rights. They are structur- ally, if not conceptually, embedded in these very same rights. Thus, the right to self-preservation (the right to life) is a classical human right that is inti- mately connected to a right to economic subsistence, if not (as Locke thought) to a right to acquire and exchange private property. Furthermore, as I shall argue below, some social and cultural rights are explicitly "civil and political" in nature, just as some civil and political rights are inherently social and cultural, enabling not only individuals but also groups to preserve their society and culture.

Borrowing a page from Henry Shue,18 I would like to argue that many rights-albeit, not necessarily all those specified by the UN Declaration of Human Rights (which includes, for instance, the right to "leisure" and "rest")-have an intrinsic value, and one-contrary to Habermas-that exists quite apart from our metaphysical condition as potentially rational speakers. Shue suggests that any society that grants individuals rights of one kind or another-and there are virtually none that don't-is theoretically committed to granting them more basic rights to subsistence, security, freedom, democratic participation, and (missing from Shue's account) culture. Rights are enforceable demands placed on others, and they cannot be made good without decent subsistence, security, freedom, and political power, all of which are complementary primary goods, in the Rawlsian sense.

The U.S. State Department's continual refusal to endorse the UN's Inter- national Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966) in wan- ton disregard of this complementarity thus parallels the theoretical obtuse- ness of both Rawls (despite his belated recognition of basic subsistence rights) and Habermas (despite his belated recognition of social and cultural




rights). Of course, there is a priority ranking among rights-the State Depart- ment has got that right-but it is not a priority of "negative" freedom over "positive" freedom. Nor is it a priority of one category of right-say, civil political-over another be it social, economic, or cultural. Rather, the priority is that of basic rights over less basic rights within each category of right. Thus, within the category of economic rights, the "subsistence" entitlement to a minimally decent share of food outweighs the "market" right to acquire and transfer property without interference.19

V GROUP RIGHTS: SUBNATIONALITIES, WOMEN, AND IMMIGRANTS

One of the unfortunate consequences of Rawls's (and possibly Habermas's) way of drawing the distinction between basic and non-basic rights is that it excludes cultural rights from the class of basic rights, thereby also neglecting the nearly equal priority of group rights. That is, although both Rawls and Habermas recognize the validity of group rights in their own fashion, they do not see such rights as essentially necessary features of liberal democratic societies. This oversight stems from the individualism implicit in discourse theory and political liberalism (as applied to individual persons or individual nations). Rawls, for instance, understands the importance of group representation in illiberal hierarchical societies (such as his idealized Islamic theocracy, Kazanistan), but he does not grasp its role in liberal democracy, which he continues to interpret primarily in terms of aggregating individual preferences. Group representation is thus conceived by him as subordinate to the integrity of individuals-be they persons or nations. Discourse theory likewise views the essence of democratic political life as centered on individual contributions to discussion. Indeed, neither political liberalism nor discourse theory provides a satisfactory account of group identity, and so neither establishes a satisfactory basis for group rights. But lacking a sound basis for group rights, neither can present a fully satisfactory theory of individual rights. This becomes evident when we turn to what Rawls and Habermas have to say about subnationalities, women and immigrants.

Subnationalities. As noted above, political liberalism presumes incommensurability between what are regarded as essentially self-contained political cultures. Traces of the kind of racially inspired cultural determinism that fueled the nationalism that swept Europe during the nineteenth and twen- tieth centuries surprisingly resurface in Rawls's appeal to nations rather than individuals or states as the preeminent moral agents (individuals) underwrit-




ing international rights. To be sure, this appeal partly rests on other grounds, namely, Rawls's view that the Law of Peoples is arrived at through first working out the principles of justice for domestic societies. In regarding a domestic liberal society from the standpoint of the original position, we make the simplifying assumption that it is closed. We regard it as "self-contained and as having no relations with other societies," in such a way that it "reproduces itself and its institutions and culture over generations" (PL, 12, 18) and its members "enter only by birth and exit only by death" (LP, 26).

Rawls, of course, is fully aware that the simplifying abstraction of a closed society bound together by a self-perpetuating national political culture is partly undermined by the fact that "historical conquests and immigration have caused the intermingling of groups with different cultures and historical memories" within the same territory. Yet he continues to hold this assumption as if it were descriptive of historical reality, even to the extent of endors- ing Mill's deterministic definition of national identity as "common sympathies" rooted in (among other things) "race and descent" (LP, 23).

For his part, Habermas finds such essentialist notions of national identity to be highly suspect. As he points out, national identities are ideological fic- tions (PC, 37) that, having once helped pave the way for democratic political integration at a local level, now threaten to obstruct it at the international level (10, 112-15). Hence, they must be radically transformed and subordinated to less all-encompassing, cosmopolitan-friendly cultural identities that are maintained and generated more or less reflectively and voluntarily. More- over, as Iris Young20 and others have pointed out, the very identification of peoples with closed territorial groups needs to be rethought, especially when considering cases of overlapping peoples, as in Northern Ireland and Israel/ Palestine. Partitioning is not always the best solution in these cases, since the economies and spaces being contested by the contending parties are essentially shared. A better solution would combine cosmopolitan forms of governance (sometimes involving third parties) with more local forms. The larger lesson to be drawn here, as in the case of economic assistance, is that local forms of participatory and/or advisory government at metropolitan and regional levels must be strengthened in tandem with more global, cosmopolitan forms.21

Despite its salubrious critique of cultural essentialism, Habermas's discourse theory goes overboard in its hostility to cultural nationalism. By equating legitimacy with a rational constitutional consensus on rights that, by definition, are impartial and neutral with respect to competing cultures and their respective conceptions of the good, Habermas demands that citizens "uncouple" their national cultural identities from the universal political culture they all share as rational individuals (I0,227). Whether democratic (pro-




cedural) impartiality requires such a strong conception of neutrality is certainly doubtful, and for two reasons: first, no institutional specification of justice can be culturally neutral. Habermas himself notes that political cultures invariably gravitate around a national culture, and this applies to liberal multicultural democracies no less than to illiberal hierarchies. Second, to the extent that he appreciates this fact, he is forced to concede that national political cultures are the essential medium in which largely abstract constitutional principles are interpreted.

This fact alone does not vitiate constitutional impartiality. Nor does the fact that different subnationalities (or subcultures) within the same national political culture interpret the constitution somewhat differently.22 The concern here is that too much subnational (or ethnic) diversity in the interpretation of a constitution will simply multiply the number of effective constitu- tions, thereby resulting in a sort of lawless anarchy. Habermas clearly thinks that nationalism is divisive in this bad sense. But he thinks that cultural pluralism is good. So the question arises, can he clearly distinguish between divisive and closed national identities, on one hand, and unifying and open cultural identities, on the other? I doubt it.23 The distinction stems from Habermas's assumption that identities that are "merely cultural" rather than quasi-racial can be sustained in their integrity through rational scrutiny in a way that national identities that are ostensibly quasi-racial cannot. Yet even he admits that opening up cultural "lifeworlds" to global communication threatens them with pathological disintegration (PC, 127). As he points out in his comments on Quebec's cultural laws, cultural instability is the price that liberal societies pay for allowing immigration.

Here, we see that the distinction between cultural and national groups totally collapses. Quebecois nationalism is not racial but cultural. The education law requiring immigrants to send their children to French-speaking schools was intended to include them in Quebec's public life, and the language laws that applied to work spaces and signs eliminated privileges rather than limited fundamental freedoms. More importantly, the laws had a thor- oughly rational basis: the preservation of a public space in its linguistic integrity. In discussing these laws, Habermas argued that legal efforts to preserve a culture inevitably run up against the freedom of expression so necessary for identity formation in liberal societies (10,222). He could have concluded just as easily that without such laws the very medium of free expression itself would have been imperiled. Again, his optimistic belief that multicultural immigration poses no danger to the preservation of liberal democracy accords with the view that unregulated multicultural communication always revitalizes otherwise ossified cultures. But given what Habermas knows about the disintegrative effects of global mass culture and "postmodern




neoliberalism" on smaller scale national-linguistic cultures (PC, 115, 124), this view seems naive.

Habermas's defense of individuals' rights to access their own particular cultures did not lead him to endorse group rights, which he found "unneces- sary" and "normatively questionable." However, he later changed his mind, including "group-specific rights"-along with a "federalist delegation of powers, a functionally specified transfer or decentralization of state compe- tencies, above all guarantees of cultural autonomy ..., compensatory policies, and other arrangements for effectively protecting minorities" (10, 145- 46)-among the "difference sensitive" strategies for protecting cultural minorities. Unfortunately, Habermas never tells us how we move from a cosmopolitan theory of individual rights to a political theory of group rights.

One way to do it is to show that cultural rights are among the list of basic, mutually complementary rights. Cultural rights may take the general form of a right to education, which is essential to exercising and politically defending one's other rights. However, they can also take a particular form. Because culture is principally passed down in the form of particular heritance, the right to culture is more than the right to education (culture in general); it is the right to access the culture of one's people(s). So a basic, universal cultural right to access culture in both a generic and particular sense may entail group rights as well as individual rights. In particular, it will entail group rights whenever the domain of culture-or, for that matter, race, gender, (dis)abil- ity, or any other group distinction-is marked out for invidious discrimination.

Cultural and political rights are among the rights mentioned in Articles 21, 22, and 27 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights that apply to groups as well as to individuals.24 Others include the rights to nationality (Article 15), trade union membership (Article 23), free association (Article 20), and religion (Article 18). More relevant to our purposes, Article 29.1 further notes that the exercise of rights is linked to duties "to the community in which alone the free and full development of [one's] personality is possible." Now, within liberal democracy the tension between "duties to the community," which are often specified as group rights, and individual rights is almost invariably resolved in favor of the latter. Since individuality is regarded as an irrepressible part of common humanity, the rights of individuals are esteemed above the rights of groups. Indeed, for Habermas, one of the trademarks of any legal right (as distinct from a purely moral right) is that it is merely permissive, imposing no corresponding duty on those who exercise them other than the duty to allow their free exercise. Having individual rights doesn't depend, therefore, on fulfilling any broader duties to the community. However, "liberals" as divergent as Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor have




persuasively argued that one's cultural and ethnic group affiliations are also an irrepressible part of one's individuality. In the words of Kymlicka, cultural membership "affects our very sense of identity and capacity" insofar as it is "the context within which we choose our ends, and come to see their value, and this is a precondition of self-respect, of the sense that one's ends are worth pursuing."25

Because cultural identity is experienced as group identity, the cultural right I have as an individual will typically be asserted in the form of a group right whenever one of the cultural groups to which I belong is singled out for discrimination. For instance, the appropriate remedy for dealing with anti- Semitic violence-which is not directed against Jews as individuals but against Jews as members of a group-is a group right, as exemplified by the New York State legislature's establishment of a separate school district for the Kiryas Joel Hasidim community.26 The same thinking applies to Que- bec's language laws. One's freedom to participate as an equal in Quebec's democracy may very well require that one share a common language with others, and since this language is threatened by the incursion of a more dominant (English) language-and for some French speakers, the incursion of English in the workplace functions to discriminate against them-laws that "impose" French in private and public spaces also protect individuals in the free exercise of their civil and political rights. Again, as John Stuart Mill argued in Representative Government, any democracy that underrepresents political groups (like African Americans) also oppresses the individuals within those groups.

An individualist like Habermas can accept the wisdom of proportional group representation, since he now concedes that group rights may be necessary for protecting individual rights (10, 221). But could he or anyone else argue that group rights are as basic as individual rights? As noted above, a conceptual argument can be made for establishing a basic individual right to culture in general (education) and to cultural identity in particular. It is incon- ceivable that individuals denied access to education or their cultural identities could effectively exercise rights or be respected as rights-bearing agents. No such argument can be made for a corresponding group right, since the latter exists solely in order to protect the individual exercise of rights from purely contingent, group-based discrimination. Nonetheless, given the widespread and enduring existence of group-based discrimination in all societies, group rights might just as well be regarded as a basic category of rights, to be differ- entially instituted on a case by case basis.

This position seems all the more reasonable once we reject the extreme Habermasian notion that liberal democratic political culture is neutral with respect to all ethnic and national subcultures that share in it and can be "de-




coupled" from them. How do we compensate subordinate minority cultures for their relative political disadvantage vis-a-vis the dominant culture? Politi- cal liberalism intervenes at this point as an explanation for why different minorities should be secured group protection and guaranteed political representation. Aboriginal minorities, for example, should be given an institutional basis for voicing their differences from the mainstream with regard to how the core norms of democracy and rights they share in common ought to be interpreted. Agreement on core norms and prescriptive rights must allow for some variation in justificatory rationale and application (as even Habermas admits) because the plurality of social positions, when coupled with the free exercise of reason, invariably yields a reasonable-but not wholly incommensurable-pluralism of lifestyles and perspectives from which to interpret constitutional essentials, including the rules and vocabu- laries of civil engagement.

Women. Rawls notes that basic human rights must be extended to women in all societies. In fact he strongly endorses Amartya Sen's research showing that societies that go beyond minimal decency and empower women to vote, run for political office, receive and use education, and own and manage property (such as the Indian state of Kerala) show "the simplest, most effective [and] most acceptable" way to ease overpopulation and food scarcity (LP, 110). That said, Rawls concedes the possibility that religious views informing the basic institutions of some decent but illiberal societies will not permit women to have equal rights such as these, an injustice he thinks is tolerable so long as women make up a majority of any group claiming to represent their interests before a national assembly (LP, 75, 110). But if, as Rawls claims, religions can't reasonably justify their subjection of women on grounds of survival, then it is unclear how they can reasonably justify their political and civil subordination for any conceivable reason.27

Understandably, when faced with the choice of equal civil and political rights for women and minorities or the preservation of a hegemonic religious community, Habermas chooses the former.28 However, the discourse theory of rights does not provide any theoretical basis for granting women as members of a discriminated group special political representation as a group. This is because it views democracy principally in terms of equal participation between individuals. But protecting women's individual civil and political rights-not to mention their basic subsistence and security rights-in Islamic societies and elsewhere will often require guaranteeing them representation as women, and in ways that seem to violate the formal demand for equal participation and representation, as interpreted by a principle of majority rule suitably qualified by constitutionally entrenched civil rights. For




example, it might require that competing political parties post a certain percentage of women candidates for contested offices (as in France), or reserve a certain percentage of legislative seats for them. It might even require the use of supermajoritarian procedures, such as office rotation and veto privileges, that aim to compensate women and oppressed minorities for their political disadvantage. This latter provision is extremely useful in protecting vulnerable ethnic minorities for whom equally weighted balloting and proportional representation are not enough.

But what about the potential domination of groups over their own dissident minorities? Dissident minorities are viewed by the groups to which they belong as external threats to the self-determination of the groups' majority membership. Very often this conflict seems like a conflict between the individual rights of dissidents and the group rights of the majority. Within an illiberal undemocratic society it very often is-tragically so. But within liberal democracy-and within an ideally open global community-dissident individuals should have the right to exit and form new groups if they cannot negotiate a reasonable compromise with the majority. Of course, the right to exit does not resolve all conflicts between individual and group-a fact that is powerfully brought home to us by the example of women inhabiting patriar- chal religious communities who must confront the hard choice of leaving their families and spiritual support groups or suffering sexist discrimination.29 But the right to exit does allow for an unprecedented freedom of association that can become the beginning of empowerment as well as emancipa- tion, as it has been for many immigrants and refugees.

Immigrants. Immigrants and refugees are the classical addressees of human rights, since they are often denied the rights of citizenship. Political liberalism, however, does a poor job of representing those rights. One might be tempted to compensate for this disadvantage by applying the Rawlsian device of an original position to cosmopolitan individuals on the grounds that citizenship and place of residence are as morally arbitrary as other unde- served features affecting their fortunes. Ignorant of their citizenship or residence, cosmopolitan individuals placed in an original position would relate to one another as fully free and equal, and so would incline toward a liberal democratic interpretation of basic rights. They would also likely opt for principles of justice allowing for relatively unrestricted freedom of movement across borders, since that would maximize the overall well-being of the most oppressed and most numerous among them.30 Assuming that Rawls is right that equal and free persons placed in a domestic (liberal democratic) original position would reject utilitarian principles in favor of strongly egalitarian ones like his Difference Principle-which allows economic inequalities only




to the extent that they benefit the worst off-then it is not unreasonable to suppose that free and equal persons placed in an international original position would choose the same way, thereby requiring massive transfers of wealth from rich individuals to poor individuals (LP, 119-20).

Things look very different if the contractors are imagined to be peoples rather than cosmopolitan citizens. Self-interested peoples, Rawls insists, have good moral reasons to protect themselves, their cultures, and the territo- ries they inhabit by instituting restrictive immigration policies-at least so long as they coexist in a world of security risks, epidemics, multicultural conflicts, and economic scarcities. These views of immigration and economic redistribution are ones-somewhat surprisingly-that Rawls draws from one of his staunchest critics, Michael Walzer, who, as an opponent of cosmopolitan liberalism, holds that protection of a people's property, no less than protection of its political culture, is sufficient to limit immigration.31 Although Rawls is probably right to argue that the political and economic causes that drive immigration would be greatly mitigated under his proposed Law of Peoples, he gives no reason why the survival needs of desperate individuals should not outweigh the culturally perfectionist expectations of affluent peoples with regard to maintaining a costly political culture and lifestyle. Like Walzer, he thinks that a global state without borders would be a cosmopolitan dystopia of deracinated men and women, and he hastens to add that under its regime, global capitalism would have free reign to overwhelm local communities (LP, 39). But elsewhere he seems more sanguine about the benefits of free trade, and although he is hardly oblivious to the harsh inequalities generated by global capitalism, he fails to note that the political evils contrib- uting to bad resource management, overpopulation, lack of investment, and other factors driving immigration are partly if not mainly attributable to a global system that has disproportionately benefited affluent, border-conscious countries.

Given his cosmopolitan liberal approach to international relations, Habermas's more sophisticated understanding of global interdependency and political diversity leads him to identify at least as strongly with the rights of individuals (such as desperate immigrants and stateless refugees) as with the rights of nations. His endorsement of a relatively open immigration policy of the sort recommended by Joseph Carens, coupled with a more egalitarian plan of global economic redistribution, follows from his recognition that the First World has disproportionately benefited from "the history of coloni- zation and the uprooting of regional cultures by the incursion of capitalist modernization" (10, 230-31). It also follows from his discourse theory, which de-essentializes national identities and places a high premium on democracy. Treating immigrants as equals in this context means, among




other things, allowing them to assimilate to a constitutional political culture without having to "give up the cultural form of life of their origins," even if doing so "changes the character of the community" (10, 229-30). Such a view, of course, needs to be qualified. As in the case of Quebec, changes in the linguistic fabric of the community cannot be allowed to extend so far that they undermine the integrity of the political culture.

VI. ECONOMIC RIGHTS

Our discussion of the group rights of immigrants again recalls the com- plex complementarity of political, cultural, and economic rights. Economic rights, too, are basic. Yet neither political liberalism nor discourse theory provides fully adequate accounts of them-for both theories seem to presume the legitimacy of capitalist markets. Rawls urges decent peoples to assist burdened nations to the extent that is necessary for them to enter into relations of peaceable mutual cooperation with them. But, he adds, many decent nations could reasonably refuse to give up wealth and resources simply for the sake of equalizing the lives of cosmopolitan individuals. Hence he opposes global distributive principles of the sort that have been advanced by Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge.32

Rawls does so because, as we've seen, he doesn't think that all decent peoples can agree on such principles. But, as Beitz notes,33 such deference to factual disagreements is not as such morally compelling. No more compelling is Rawls's view that moral psychology dictates limited expectations regarding the capacity of persons to think of themselves from a cosmopolitan view. The idea that we must privilege the toleration of peoples above respecting individuals' economic rights simply because individuals identify themselves first and foremost as fellow members of a territorially bounded scheme of mutual cooperation and responsibility confuses (in the words of Beitz) "questions about justification and those about institutional design."34 Even if territorial states happen to be the most efficient mechanism for managing resources for mutual benefit and so provide an exemplary basis for determining our primary obligations as citizens, this fact alone says nothing about our psycho- logical capacity to identify with, and care for, strangers as human beings. If persons in large multicultural states can identify with one another for this reason, surely they can identify with outsiders for the same reason (indeed, we may depend on, and have more in common with, people who live outside our nation than with people who live within it). In any case, Rawls is wrong to adopt the communitarian maxim that moral psychology-or feelings of solidarity with fellow members (whoever they might be)-ought to determine




the extent of our moral duties; for allowing this is tantamount to caving in to ethnocentric prejudice, surely one of the most virulent causes of terrorism.

Rawls's privileging of peoples over individuals as the principal subjects of international law also undermines his defense of a principle of assistance to burdened societies. Rawls insists that this principle not be understood as a requirement of international distributive justice to be implemented continu- ously but merely as a duty to raise all societies to a minimum level of political culture and economic sustainability commensurate with requirements of minimal decency. As such, the duty has a definite "cutoff point." Here again, Rawls offers scant justification for the duty, other than the possible global security risks that unstable societies pose to the rest of the world. Although he remarks that liberal democratic societies will be morally required to (1) relieve absolute poverty so that people can live decent lives, (2) mitigate the stigma of inferiority that comes with differences in wealth, and (3) secure fair conditions for democratic politics, he notes that these reasons do not directly apply to the international arena, except insofar as any well-ordered decent people will have met the basic needs of each citizen so that they, as an equal and autonomous member of the Society of Well-Ordered Peoples, can decide for themselves "the significance and importance of the wealth of [their] own society" (LP, 114-15). So, unlike the individual-centered theory of justice he developed earlier with respect to liberal democracy, there is no mention here of the unfairness of allowing arbitrary circumstances, such as one's being born in a poor, resource-starved country, to diminish one's equal chances for a free and fulfilling life.

Rawls's resistance to a global theory of distributive justice is also reveal- ing, in that it reflects his questionable views about the capacity of states to be economically independent and autonomous in their distribution of resources. Rawls asserts that "there is no society anywhere in the world-except in marginal cases-with resources so scarce that it could not, were it reasonably and rationally organized and governed, become well-ordered" (LP, 108). Leaving aside the questionableness of this assertion, Rawls makes no reference to causes other than lack of resources that contribute to the impoverishment of nations, except perhaps unfair trade agreements (LP, 69). This is surprising, given his understanding of how capitalist economies in liberal democracies generate inequalities whose effects on the life chances of disadvantaged persons are both arbitrary and unjust and therefore require correction through redistributive means. Thus, to take the example of fair trade, there is now a voluminous literature on how inequalities in capital and other resources enable developed countries to implement free trade agreements that con- demn underdeveloped countries to perpetual neocolonial dependency; weakened health, education, and welfare service; ecological devastation; political




corruption; class warfare; resource depletion; and (for most inhabitants) poverty. In sum, the national resource sufficiency and international fair trade that Rawls maintains are necessary for bringing about a global "Society of Well- Ordered Peoples" are undermined by a capitalist global structure.

Rawls gives additional reasons a principle of global distributive justice is infeasible-none of them convincing. He argues, for instance, that it would be unjust to demand that well-ordered nations that have managed their economies responsibly-through hard work, population control, and savings- transfer some of their wealth to poorer, well-ordered nations that have not been as industrious or thrifty. As Beitz notes, the appeal of this argument tac- itly depends "on an analogy with individual morality, where we typically believe that society has no obligation to hold people harmless from the adverse consequences of their own informed, uncoerced choices."35 The full force of this argument becomes apparent once we realize that individuals inhabiting most underdeveloped nations had much less choice in determining their economic fates than individuals inhabiting developed ones. For example, many heavily indebted poor countries in Africa, Asia, and Central Amer- ica accrued their debt and, along with it, a corresponding poor credit rating that discouraged outside investment during the Cold War, when the U.S. government and its allies "persuaded" the leaders of these countries (some of them military dictators) to take out loans intended for military defense and commercial infrastructure. The average citizen in these countries had little say in these decisions and received few, if any, benefits from the loans (indeed, many of the loans were pilfered by corrupt officials or invested in bad projects, often with the knowing acquiescence of U.S. officials). Not only was the choice to accept these loans constrained (if not coerced) by the U.S. government-thereby making Americans coresponsible for the loans- but the deregulation of currencies and the decline in the value of the dollar (and dollar-pegged exports, such as oil) resulted in inflationary interest rates that increased the debt burden of client states to the oppressive levels they are today. Only a blanket forgiveness of that burden-not the structural readjust- ment policies dictated by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as conditions for receiving further multilateral loans-will save these nations from total ruin.

Perhaps it is unfair to saddle Rawls's theory of economic assistance with the burden of having to deal with "marginal" cases like this, and perhaps his strictures about fair trade might reach all the way down to regulating, in some form, the background structures and institutions constraining trade. Granting that, it is presuming a lot to suppose that representatives of peoples in the global original position of choice seeking to advance the corporate interests of their respective peoples would settle for a weak principle of charity (the




duty to assist burdened peoples) instead of a more egalitarian principle of distributive justice. Would not knowledge of the short-term (and, very possibly, long-term) detrimental effects of a global market system on the most vulnerable nations of the world lead them to view continuous economic redistribution as a matter of right, necessary for guaranteeing the equality and autonomy of all trading partners? As Thomas Pogge argues (see n. 32), even more egalitarian principles of distributive justice, like the Difference Principle Rawls invokes for liberal democratic societies, would be preferred if the representatives in the global original position represented individuals (heads of households or caretakers of dependents) instead of peoples.

It would be wrong to think that Rawls's anti-egalitarian views on global economic justice simply follow from his privileging (in the words of Samuel Scheffler) "special responsibilities to the members of our own families, communities, and societies" over "general responsibilities" to needy others and humanity at large.36 An emphasis on general responsibilities-as the neoliberal defense of free markets shows-can be no less anti-egalitarian than can an emphasis on special responsibilities be egalitarian-as the protectionist defense of local economies likewise shows. Rawls's appeal to the rights of peoples imposes limits on any global egalitarian redistribution but is not hostile to egalitarian outcomes achieved through protectionist means. However, it is a very large question whether nation-states can protect their domestic economies without banding together in larger supranational organizations that are democratically empowered to regulate market inequalities and externalities. Here again, economic self-determination at the level of the group (or community) rather than the nation might be the most efficacious way to protect economic rights. Regional and metropolitan self-determination, however, needs to be coupled with interregional and, ultimately, supranational regulatory bodies in order to rein in multinational corporations and ensure equitable development.

In the current era of globalization, liberal democracies across the board are under increasing pressure by financial institutions-and, yes, global economic entities like the EU-to embrace structural adjustment policies that exact a heavy toll on social services and other security nets essential to egalitarian democracy. As Allen Buchanan rightly observes, Rawls's protectionist understanding seems to reflect a "vanished Westphalian world" that inade- quately captures the interdependency of nations.37 Specifically, Rawls over- estimates the extent to which states are "economically self-sufficient" and "distributionally autonomous"38 while at the same time idealizing the degree to which they are "politically homogenious," without internal politico-cultural divisions.




Habermas, by contrast, tends to view international justice as an extension of domestic justice; in his opinion, relationships of mutual dependency and mutual effect implicate something like a "basic structure" requiring rectifica- tion vis-a-vis principles of distributive justice. This suggestion-as salutary as it is-might not go far enough, however. Habermas often comes close to associating modernization (and therewith moral and legal enlightenment) with the development of market systems that have a strongly capitalistic fla- vor. Indeed, he seldom ever acknowledges the possibility of market-based socialism and usually couches his criticism of globalization in terms of "tam- ing" the capitalist economic system.39 Furthermore, because of his relative neglect of group rights, he underestimates the possible economic benefits that might flow from a two-tiered strategy combining local democratic oversight of regional economies (protectionism) with supranational democratic oversight of global economies.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

I have sought to sketch a theory of human rights that satisfies four criteria-of universality, prescriptive determinacy, priority, and completeness- better than competing cosmopolitan liberal and political liberal theories. Rawlsian political liberalism secures a universal basis (overlapping consensus) for human rights at the cost of prescriptive force. Habermasian cosmopolitan liberalism mitigates this defect by framing human rights as an evolving consensus that arises from egalitarian and emancipatory communicative premises and aims toward the full realization (and institutionalization) of liberal democratic rights. However, neither Habermasian cosmopolitan liberalism nor Rawlsian political liberalism presents an adequate account of the complementarity of all rights, including economic, cultural, and social rights. And neither adequately distinguishes basic from non-basic rights. Some economic rights are basic and realizing them will require more radical changes in governance structures than either Rawlsian political liberalism or Habermasian cosmopolitan liberalism countenances. Ultimately, an adequate account of human rights must accommodate differences in social standpoint, both within and between nations, which means-contrary to cosmopolitan liberalism and political liberalism-that the rights of groups no less than the rights of individuals will have to be politically recognized within liberal democracy typically and not just occasionally. Only in this way can the rights of women, immigrants, and subnationalities be fully protected.

That is also why an international democratic federation of liberal democracies and interest groups is really the only lasting basis on which to build




peace and justice.40 Until this federation becomes a reality (and we have no reason to think that it can't), full toleration and trust between nations will remain elusive. In the meantime, those of us living in affluent democracies should pressure our leaders to promote more liberal democracy here and abroad, preferably through diplomacy and not sanctions, and-remaining ever mindful of our nation's own present and past failure to honor its principles-forswearing any crusades that falsely and immodestly (and hypocriti- cally) equate liberal democracy with our liberal democracy. Above all, we should bear in mind the fact that tolerance means something quite different in a post-Westphalian world of partially sovereign nations. It means openness to interdependency and mutual vulnerability. In today's world, we would be deluding ourselves if we thought that unilateralism-especially when arro- gantly trumpeted by the world's only superpower in brazen pursuit of its own narrow self-interest-is an effective way to deal with terrorism and other global calamities. Absent enforceable international covenants on such pressing issues as ecological safety, economic justice, gender discrimination, and racism, human rights abuse and other morally unconscionable suffering will continue unabated, and the world remain a less secure place because of it.

NOTES

1. J. Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), hereafter LP.

2. Among the human rights mentioned by Rawls are the right to life (to the means of subsistence and security); to liberty (to freedom from slavery, serfdom, and forced occupation, and to a sufficient measure of liberty of conscience to ensure freedom of religion and thought); to property (personal property); and to formal equality as expressed by the rules of natural justice (that is, that similar cases be treated similarly) (LP, 65). Elsewhere Rawls notes that Articles 3 to 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) count as universal human rights in his sense, whereas Article 1, which asserts that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights," expresses a particular liberal interpretation of human rights (LP, 80).

3. Rawls excludes from the Society of Well Ordered Peoples (i.e., peoples who are guaranteed protection from international sanction) such unreasonable peoples as outlaw states that violate human rights and benevolent dictatorships that respect human rights but deny their citizens a meaningful role in making political decisions. Also excluded are reasonable societies burdened by unfavorable economic or cultural circumstances (LP, 4). Rawls includes decent consultation hierarchies, in which only some persons are allowed to run for and hold office. Persons choose members of their own group (occupational, religious, etc.) to represent them in an assembly of group representatives but do not directly vote as individuals for government officers. Govern- ment leaders (some of whom might be chosen by a clerical hierarchy) consult the higher assembly, fairly balancing the interests of all groups.

4. Cf. Allen Buchanan, "Justice, Legitimacy, and Human Rights," in The Idea of a Political Liberalism, edited by V. Davion and C. Wolf (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 73-




89; Kok-Chor Tan, "Liberal Toleration in Rawls's Law of Peoples," Ethics 108 (January 1998): 283-85; and Darrel Moellendorf, "Constructing the Law of Peoples," Pacific Philosophic Quar- terly 77, no. 2 (1996): 283-85.

5. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1971] 1999).

6. J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (PL) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 7. As Rawls notes, because the original position posits its subjects as free and equal, and

assumes a reasonable pluralism of comprehensive doctrines, it contradicts the circumstances of justice that obtain in illiberal consultation hierarchies (LP, 70). Hence, there is no domestic application of the original position to these peoples.

8. Cf. Brian Barry, Theories of Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Joseph Carens, "Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders," Review of Politics 49, no. 92 (1987): 251-73.

9. Joseph Carens, "Aliens and Citizens," conceives the global original position to apply to individuals rather than nations. This approach is expressly favored by Pogge in Realizing Rawls, although in a later essay, "An Egalitarian Law of Peoples," Philosophy and Public Affairs 23 (1994): 195-224, he defends a global resource tax proposal by accepting, for the sake of argument, Rawls's assumption that the global original position contain representatives of homogeneous peoples.

10. At best, Rawls favors a comprehensive Kantian philosophy that holds that the most just and stable conception of human rights is liberal democratic. Interestingly, he now concedes "the proviso" that non-public reasons might be given in civil argument but only if they are accompa- nied by purely public (political) reasons (LP, 125, 152).

11. Although Rawls normally talks about a plurality of "opposing" and "irreconcilable" doctrines (PL, 3), he occasionally refers to a "plurality of conflicting and incommensurable doctrines" (PL, 135). By "irreconcilable" Rawls seems to mean "uncompromising" (PL, 138); "incommensurable," by contrast, suggests that doctrines are "uncompromising" by not being fully translatable into a common public language in which they might be rationally discussed and modified. If so, incommensurability would serve to immunize doctrines from the demands of public accountability. However, as Habermas (citing well-known arguments by Donald Davidson) notes, such incommensurability is itself incoherent.

12. Habermas's contributions to this debate are contained in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, edited by C. Cronin and P. De Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), chap. 2 and 3.

13. C. Taylor, "Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights," in The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, edited by Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel Bell (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1999), 101-19.

14. Contrary to Habermas but in agreement with Rawls, Charles Taylor proposes the idea of "alternative modernities" to capture the different legal forms by which diverse nations will institutionalize universal "norms of action," along with market-industrial economies and bureaucratic administrations. He thinks that neither these legal forms nor the specific rationales by which they are justified need refer to "subjective" or "individual" rights in the liberal sense. See C. Taylor, "Nationalism and Modernity," in The Morality of Nationalism, edited by R. McKim and J. McMahon (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a critique of Taylor's views that is sympathetic to Habermas, see T. McCarthy, "On Reconciling Cosmopolitan Unity and National Diversity," Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1997).




15. J. Habermas, Die Postnationale Konstellation. Politische Essays (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), hereafter PC.

16. J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 127, hereafter BFN.

17. I thank Jeff Flynn for suggesting the distinction between justificatory and institutional priority.

18. Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). My critical reconstruction of Shue's position is contained in David Ingram, Group Rights: Reconciling Equality and Difference (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), chap. 11.

19. The State Department urged that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights be split into two independently ratifiable treaties: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. While supporting the former covenant, the State Department has refused to endorse the latter on the grounds that these rights are less genuine and binding. Clearly, even if we accept the view, espoused by Habermas among others, that cultural and social rights cannot have priority over civil and political rights, since the former "only serve to guarantee the 'fair value' (Rawls); i.e., the actual conditions, for the equal exercise of liberal and political rights" (PC, 187), it doesn't follow that political and civil rights have priority over cultural and social rights. The mere fact that we can agree on civil and political rights with greater facility and that negative rights to noninterference are easier to discern and enforce is no reason to privilege them over economic, social, and cultural rights. In any case, the UN's division of rights is arbitrary and incoherent. Some rights, like the right to join labor unions, straddle the distinction, while most rights that fall under one covenant are ineffec- tual apart from being conjoined with rights falling under the other. Even as a marker of priorities, the distinction fails to take into account that within each division there are rights that are more basic (meriting greater protection) than others. Thus, the economic right to acquire land and pro- ductive capacity for profit is less basic than the economic right to bare subsistence, just as the political right to contribute money to political campaigns and parties is less basic than the right to vote. By not taking into account the priority of subsistence over market freedom, the State Department has imposed its own hyper-libertarian, hyper-individualist interpretation of basic rights in a manner that subverts-rather than promotes-the aims of liberal democracy.

20. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 257-63.

21. Ibid., chaps. 6 and 7; Jordi Borja and Manuel Castells, Local and Global: Management of Cities in the Information Age (London: Earthscan, 1997).

22. Cf. Michel Seymour, "On Redefining the Nation," The Monist 82, no. 3 (July 1999): esp. 427, 432ff.

23. Cf. M. Pensky, "Cosmopolitanism and the Solidarity Problem: Habermas on National and Cultural Identities," Constellations 7, no. 1 (2000): 64-79.

24. Following Germany's notorious appeal-in justification of its expansionist policies in the late thirties-to bilateral and multilateral treaty provisions under the League of Nations granting irredentist Germans living in Poland and Czechoslovakia special privileges and rights, the United Nations deleted all references to the rights of ethnic and national minorities in its Uni- versal Declaration of Human Rights. Nevertheless, some of the individual rights mentioned by the Declaration are rights that are typically exercised in groups (see below). Furthermore, the United Nations has been debating both a Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1993) and a draft Universal Declaration on Indigenous Rights (1988).




25. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1991), 192-93.

26. I discuss the Kiryas Joel and the following problem of proportional representation in Ingram, Group Rights, chaps. 1 and 9.

27. Rawls cites (LP, 110, n. 39; 151, n. 46) Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im's book, Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law (Syracuse: Syra- cuse University Press, 1990), and Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), to support the view that Islamic divine law (at least the interpretation of Shari'a based on the early Mecca teachings of Mohammad) supports the equality of men and women and other constitutional essentials.

28. Against arguments advanced by East Asian signatories to the Bangkok Declaration (1993), Habermas insists that the rights associated with liberalism and democracy are intrinsic to modernization (PC, 181). Contrary to Rawls, he even insists that state neutrality with respect to religion is necessary for full religious toleration (PC, 187).

29. Cf. Ingram, Group Rights, chaps. 1 and 5, for a discussion of sex discrimination in aboriginal and religious communities.

30. This argument is advanced by Carens, "Aliens and Citizens." For a detailed discussion of immigration rights, see Ingram, Group Rights, chap. 6.

31. LP, 39, and M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 38ff. 32. LP, 117. Rawls finds Charles Beitz's "resource redistribution principle" inconsequential

because he thinks that a nation's political culture is more decisive in hindering its capacity to achieve economic independence than its level of resources. He rejects Beitz's "global distribution principle," which applies the difference principle to peoples, because it would penalize unfairly a nation that had voluntarily controlled its population or increased its rate of savings and industrial development in comparison to another nation similarly situated that had chosen not to do so. Rawls is willing to accept Thomas Pogge's Global Resources Tax on resource use but only if it specifies as its cutoff point the elevation of the world's poorest peoples to the level where their citizens' basic needs are fulfilled and they can stand on their own (LP, 119). For criticisms of Pogge's proposal, see Roger Crisp and Dale Jamieson, "Egalitarianism and a Global Resources Tax: Pogge on Rawls," in Davion and Wolf, The Idea of a Political Liberalism, 90-101; Hillel Steiner, "Just Taxation and International Redistribution," in Global Justice. NOMOS XLI, edited by I. Shapiro and L. Brilmayer (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 171-91.

33. Charles Beitz, "Rawls's Law of Peoples," Ethics 110 (July 2000): 681. 34. Ibid., 683. 35. Ibid., 691-92. 36. S. Scheffler, "The Conflict between Justice and Responsibility," in I. Shapiro and L.

Brilmayer, 86-106. 37. Allen Buchanan, "Rawls's Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World,"

Ethics 110 (July 2000): 701-3. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) that ended decades of religious warfare between European states viewed relations between largely self-sufficient and sovereign nations in military rather than economic terms.

38. For Buchanan "states are more or less economically self-sufficient if and only if they can . . . provide adequately for the material needs of their population. .... A state is distributionally autonomous if and only if it can determine how wealth is distributed within its borders" ("Rawls's Law of Peoples," 702).

39. For further discussion of Habermas's ambivalent attitude toward market economies, see my essay, "Individual Freedom and Social Equality: Habermas's Democratic Revolution in the Social Contractarian Justification of Law," in Perspectives on Habermas, edited by Lewis E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 289-308.




40. In addition to democratizing and opening up global banking and trading institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations should be restructured, either by abolishing the veto of the permanent members of the Security Council or by opening up the permanent membership to states from the Southern hemisphere. In addition to this reform, Young (Inclusion and Democracy, 273) recommends supplementing the General Assembly of nations with a People's Assembly, composed of persons, elected directly by individuals from all over the world, who would represent vulnerable subgroups, including women, indigenous people, and poor people.

David Ingram is a professor of philosophy at Loyola University, Chicago. He is author and editor of numerous books, including Habermas and the Dialectic Reason (1987); Critical Theory and Philosophy (1990); Critical Theory: The Essential Readings (1991); Reason, History, and Politics: The Communitarian Grounds of Reason in the Modern Age (1995); Group Rights: Reconciling Equality and Difference (2000); and The Politi- cal: Readings in Continental Philosophy (2002). In 1998, he received Casa Guatemala's Human Rights Award. He is currently working on a book that will bring together issues concerning disability rights, group identity, and identity politics in adjudication and law.



Documents

Between Political Liberalism and Postnational Cosmopolitanism-Toward an Alternative Theory (David Ingran, 2003)