Cosmopolitanism and the Solidarity Problem: Habermas on National and Cultural Identities

This paper argues that some implications of globalization, and of cosmopolitanism understood as a considered political response to globalization, have rendered the distinction between national identity and cultural identity deeply problematic. Cosmopolitan projects that do not aim at the creation of a world state but rather at a “mid-level” set of institutional and procedural measures toward a global democratic order, such as that of Jürgen Habermas, depend upon a reasonably robust normative distinction between national identity as a primary disabling condition for cosmopolitan democracy and cosmopolitan forms of solidarity generally, on one side, and cultural identity as an enabling condition for subjects accommodating themselves to democratic procedures in multicultural states on the other. The argument will trace the relation between national and cultural identities in Habermas’s position, and will show how this relation grows problematic. My closing remarks will suggest that the cosmopolitan project, rather than trying to find a way around this problem, should confront it squarely, and acknowledge that it is precisely the loss of cultural identities in the face of globalization processes that can serve as the basis for a substantive cosmopolitan global ethics. Habermas has defended a rather temperate version of the project of cosmopolitan democracy. He explicitly rejects the ambition of a world democratic state, and has instead called for measures to provide new institutional foundations, or strengthen existing ones, that can support popular sovereignty, democratic procedures, and legal protections beyond the framework of the nation-state. Habermas’s position is, at heart, a legal cosmopolitanism that serves to advance a moral argument against the specific ethical substance of the modern nation-state. Specifically, Habermasian cosmopolitanism is the claim that the inherent contradiction between the particularism of national identity and the universalism of subjective rights can only effectively be compensated if the legal institutions and processes that recognize and enforce basic rights are removed from the level of the sovereign nation state to an as-yet unrealized institutionalization of coercive cosmopolitan law.1 Habermas recognizes, of course, that such a project would require a considerable change in the political self-understanding of global political actors. Such a change can be reasonably expected only on the basis of a form of cosmopolitan solidarity beyond national borders on the part of citizens, a solidarity that can serve as a resource of social integration and political motivation beyond traditional nation-states.2