Reasoning With Who We Are by Redhead Mark;

Author:Redhead, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Put another way, all three sets of new moral facts force us to confront the point that democracies today cannot live with the juridical illusion of closed borders as politics and economics are constantly being exercised above and across them. However, human rights require “local contextualization, interpretation, and vernacularization by self-governing peoples.”[64] Following the principle of justificatory universalism, we can see that there is today a legitimate range in variation and implementation of human rights, even the right of equality under the law. Without the right of local self-government, these variations cannot be legitimated.[65] Moreover, “when such rights principles are appropriated by people as their own, these principles lose their parochialism as well as the suspicion of Western paternalism often associated with them.”[66]

Citizenship and immigration issues are a case in point as they implicitly invoke appeals for a cosmopolitan framework for deliberation about their legitimacy or the lack thereof, though the specific cosmopolitan rights that individuals might enjoy are subject to the vicissitudes of local democratic politics. At the same time, citizenship and immigration issues are central to the practice of democratic governance within a state because the rights of foreigners, asylum claimants, and visitors mark a threshold, that boundary at the site of which “the identity of ‘we, the people,’ is defined and renegotiated, bounded and unraveled, circumscribed or rendered fluid.”[67] Effective democratic governance entails a commitment to an ongoing process of “reflexive acts of self-constitution, whereby the boundaries of the demos can be readjusted” to the changing political realities confronting a polity.[68] Some practices of democratic closure are more legitimate than others, but all should be open to deliberative moments of contestation, reappropriation and delegitimation in which a universalistic criteria of human rights serve as the ultimate arbiter.[69] To advance the Arendtian ideal of the right to have rights, we need to see citizenship claims as caught in the tension between the moral imperatives of cosmopolitanism and the political requirements of democratic closure. This dilemma between the universalist demands of human rights and the particularist imperatives of political membership is especially acute for Benhabib and Habermas. The right to justification appears to entail that all those who are to be subject to a law should have the right to be included in a collective deliberation on the legitimacy of that law, but the foreigner, by definition, is excluded from such a discussion. Hence, as Benhabib notes,

either a discourse theory is simply irrelevant to membership practices in that it cannot articulate any justifiable criteria of exclusion, or it simply accepts existing practices of exclusion as morally neutral historical contingencies that require no further validation. But this would suggest that a discourse theory of democracy is itself chimerical insofar as democracy would seem to require a morally justifiable closure which discourse ethics cannot deliver.[70]

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