WORLD VIEW:'GLOBAL DOMESTIC politics". This notion was first put forward by the German physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker in 1963 and has since become an important ingredient of his country's debate on international affairs. Influenced by Immanuel Kant and framed during the height of the cold war, it was taken up in the 1970s by Willy Brandt, rephrased as "world domestic politics" and later became a central idea of the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, writes Paul Gillespie.
It captures very well what would be required for world politics to be understood not through the prism of sovereign nation-states but "as a worldwide society characterised by cross-border networks, as opposed to a collection of nation-states colliding with one another like billiard balls", as an article in the current International Politik published by the German Council of Foreign Affairs puts it. "Then the distinction between internal and external affairs becomes obsolete. Domestic affairs are now influenced by the external world and the external world is influenced by domestic affairs," write Hermann Ott and Wolfgang Sachs.
This means national welfare is no longer an effective frame of reference for enlightened foreign policy; it must be extended to encompass the common welfare of a world society.
Kant, in his 1795 essay Perpetual Peace, called for the establishment of a world civil society. A sustainable world order would mean that states would refrain from acting like competing individuals pursuing their own power interests. He envisaged a transformation of relations of power into relations of co-operation, placing the rights of the citizen above the interests of their states.
That cosmopolitan vision has never been more needed to deal with issues which have become global such as climate change, financial and economic turmoil, and international security. But it must be fleshed out and expressed so as to link the domestic and the global. In fact they are increasingly imbricated, but this does not mean they are experienced in the same way by different types of people.
The cosmopolitanism of frequent travellers must be distinguished from the particular rootedness of less mobile people who are still the great majority. As US sociologist Craig Calhoun puts it in the summer 2008 Daedalus journal devoted to the subject: "The class consciousness of frequent travellers involves not only privilege, but the illusion that our experience of diversity and mobility reveals the world as a whole."
His argument that it would be a mistake to understand the wholeness of the world as already complete is convincing, since this is based on the abstract equivalence of human beings rather than "on an always incomplete but richly open building of more and hopefully better social connections". Thinking in terms of connections, one is less likely to turn a blind eye "to the material inequalities that shape the ways in which different people can belong to specific groups while still inhabiting the world as a whole".
Connections made by markets, ideologies, media and climate change currently drive the cross-border networks on which the argument for a global domestic politics is based. Recognising this incompleteness, one can debate whether they have indeed reached the point where such a politics becomes possible. Does the older internationalism - predicated on the continuing viability and indispensability of nation-states - still recognise these realities better than a cosmopolitanism which assumes we are now in a post-national era?
Habermas certainly believes the post-national era has arrived. In an interview with the German weekly Die Zeit(November 6th, available in English at http://www.signandsight.com/features/1798.html), he welcomes the demise of neoliberalism and privatisation and the new understanding that politics not the capitalist market is responsible for promoting the common good. But he laments the failure so far to equip the United Nations and the European Union with the radical empowering reforms needed to create a properly functioning global domestic politics. He describes the EU's recent economic crisis management as much more intergovernmental than a genuine joint political will-formation - notably Germany's Berlin republic which is forgetting the lessons the old federal republic drew from history.
Nevertheless, Habermas hopes the US under Barack Obama could place itself at the head of the reform movement to bring world institutions more into line with global issues.
Writing in the Financial Timesthis week, Gideon Rachman speculated that a world government to deal with global warming, the financial crisis and terrorism is now genuinely possible. He mentioned some of the radical ideas around Obama's transition team favouring strong UN capacity and action.
But while the EU may provide a model for law-based international government, it remains too weak to carry nationally rooted political identities with it. That is the Lisbon dilemma. There is still a mismatch between the practices of government and of democracy.
This was put very well by Irish legal scholar Deirdre Curtin in her presentation to the recent Oireachtas subcommittee on the future of Europe. National parliaments, in particular, "have not kept up with what their national executives are doing or not doing. They have stayed put within their own neatly nationally fenced-off compartments. The executive, however, has leaped over the fence and developed into a strongly interwoven complex administrative network, beyond the horizons of many, perhaps all, national parliaments."
pgillespie@irishtimes.com