The Humanity of Universal Crime by Sinja Graf

Author:Sinja Graf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Crimes against humanity, which surpass in gravity mere human rights violations, hence provide a minimal normative integration across the world via the emotions they produce in publics around the world. Moreover, Western liberal democracies are already normatively integrated via their constitutional orders. In the absence of such normative cohesion in domestic politics in the non-Western world, the concept of crimes against humanity functions as a minimalist normative residue of universal recognition for peoples who lack such political organization. They come into global view through the injuries to mankind committed in their societies. Lastly, I assess the hierarchical constellation of global law enforcement action as it emerges from Habermas’s reliance on the vocabulary of international criminality. Together, these last two points recapture the minimal normative integration and the normative hierarchy that is the signature of the political productivity of notions of universal crime. The fact that NATO in 1999 responded to crimes against humanity, unlike the US-led coalition in 2003, Habermas argues, renders the former an instance of global policing, not one of warfare. He further argues explicitly against the principle of sovereign equality in international law, thereby advocating hierarchical instead of anarchical relationships between polities across the world. The metaphor of global policing and law enforcement banishes the specter of warfare from Habermas’s sketch of a reformed cosmopolitan order by disavowing the fact that such police forces in fact remain military forces. This legalist disavowal of the role of violence in a future cosmopolitan world order is enabled by Habermas’s reliance on the domestic analogy that structures his vision of a “world domestic policy” without a world state. The domestic analogy that attends his arguments on legitimate hierarchies in a cosmopolitan world order coalesces with the claim to humanity as a collective subject united by universal norms. As we will see, Habermas projects his mapping of the “hierarchies of humanity” on the distinction between OECD states and “despotic” states.

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