Week 3 - Jurkevics and Benhabib

Critical International Political Theory

Anna Jurkevics and Seyla Benhabib
The Oxford Handbook of International Political Theory
Edited by Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley
Print Publication Date: Mar 2018

Subject: Political Science, Political Theory, International Relations
Online Publication Date: Apr 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198746928.013.5
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter assesses debates within the field of Critical Theory, broadly conceived, on
central themes of international politics, including sovereignty, human rights, and Ameri
can hegemony. After the Cold War, many critical theorists followed Jürgen Habermas’s
shift in focus from domestic politics to the “post-national constellation.” We explore
Habermasian critiques of Westphalian sovereignty and the accompanying call for cos
mopolitan solutions to crises of human rights and migration. We also consider the critical
re-evaluations of sovereignty that arose following 9/11 in response to the American “war
on terror.” Finally, we turn to the recent return to sovereignty within Critical Theory. The
most convincing new approaches call for a nuanced evaluation of the relationship be
tween sovereignty and cosmopolitanism in order to rethink the institutional configuration
of a world order that is already decidedly post-national.
Keywords: Critical Theory, sovereignty, cosmopolitanism, human rights, Habermas, Frankfurt School, 9/11, migra
tion, Schmitt, Arendt
THE end of the Cold War ushered in a lively revival of political theory. During the 1990s,
Europe advanced from economic unification to a nascent post-national political form. As
rapid globalization deepened economic, legal, and administrative ties beyond the state,
cosmopolitanism no longer seemed a matter of mere speculation. The novelty of a world
order beyond state sovereignty started to come into view, and with it, ambitious and opti
mistic gestures towards political possibilities for the new millennium suggested them
selves. Critiques of Westphalian sovereignty abounded alongside hopes that justice would
extend across borders, and that International Human Rights Law (IHRL) might rival the
power of states. One of the most influential voices to emerge during this period was the
critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, who called for post-national democracy and the consti
tutionalization of international law (Habermas 2001). Habermas’s turn from domestic to
international politics helped to initiate critical theory’s sustained engagement with issues
related to sovereignty, human rights, and world order. This chapter will explore the con
versations that resulted from this turn.
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The optimism of the 1990s was short-lived, as September 11, 2001 and its aftermath
opened a new era of international crises. Critical Theory’s response to post-9/11 crises—
from the ascendance of American hegemony and “war on terror” to exclusions in the face
of mass migrations, environmental degradation, and the accumulation of power by
transnational corporations—exposes an uneasiness, an ambivalence at the core of the
post-national project. Where some view cosmopolitanism as an emancipatory project, of
fering solutions to the aforementioned crises, others call it the façade of neo-liberal em
pires. A divide has come into focus among critical theorists between sovereigntists and
cosmopolitans. At stake is Critical Theory’s normative stance toward the nation-state it
self: is the sovereign state a source of emancipation or emancipation’s greatest obstacle?
In what follows, we take account of the fact that Critical Theory has migrated over the
last half-century away from its origins in the work of the Frankfurt School alone, and is
(p. 75) a title now claimed by theorists who employ deconstruction (à la Jacques Derrida),
psychoanalysis, feminist, and post-colonial forms of critique. There have also been schol
ars in international relations who have adopted these methods of analysis, thus leading to
a novel convergence between Critical Theory and international relations studies.
We begin by outlining Critical Theory’s history and recent convergence with international
political theory. We then survey the field through engagement with three central mo
ments in the debate over sovereignty. First, we consider arguments, bourgeoning in the
1990s, in favour of cosmopolitanism (see Chapter 3). Next, we explore critical re-evalua
tions of sovereignty in the wake of 9/11 and the American “war on terror.” Finally, we dis
cuss the recent return to sovereignty within Critical Theory. With Britain’s exit from the
EU now pending, the idea of turning from cosmopolitan integration back to sovereignty
has become all too real. We conclude by considering current approaches that call for a
nuanced evaluation of the relationship between sovereignty and cosmopolitanism in order
to rethink the institutional configuration of a world order that is already decidedly post-
national.
Critical Theory and International Relations

Critical theory describes a broad methodological tradition of interdisciplinary social and
political theory and research. It finds its roots in the Frankfurt School, which originated
in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt in association with the Institute for Social Re
search. Figures like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Herbert Mar
cuse, and Walter Benjamin were early members, while Jürgen Habermas has exercised
the greatest influence from among the second and third generations of Frankfurt School
scholars.
Initially, Critical Theory did not take international relations, institutions, and politics as its
subject. Critique was aimed primarily at forms of domination inscribed in the economic,
cultural, and psycho-social conditions of domestic, i.e. national society, understood as the
“social totality.” Early critical theorists were particularly interested in the authoritarian
tendencies of putatively liberal societies. They employed immanent critique in order to
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understand historical trajectories and conditions that shaped the social totality and its
contradictions. Such contradictions produced crisis, which in turn opened possibilities for
transformation and emancipation. The goal of the theorist was to explicate the contradic
tory totality of conditions through immanent critique in order to reveal how things could
be otherwise; the critical theorist always sought emancipation from contemporary condi
tions of domination (Devetak 2009).
The shift away from the nation-state viewed as the “social totality” toward international
and transnational spheres should come as no surprise. Kant and Marx, forerunners in the
tradition of critique, were both concerned with the international conditions (p. 76) of pos
sibility for political emancipation (Devetak 2009). Karl Marx’s critiques laid bare the
transnational structures of capitalism that cause domination (see Chapter 49). Immanuel
Kant, on the other hand, had outlined international constitutional conditions for domestic
republican freedom; he also formulated the original proposal for “cosmopolitan
right” (Kant 1991 [1795]). While some critical theories of recognition have retained a pri
marily domestic scope, much of contemporary Critical Theory has returned to the
projects proposed by Kant and Marx.
Furthermore, contemporary international political theorists such as Robert Cox, Andrew

Linklater, Cynthia Weber, and Kimberly Hutchings follow an approach that reflects
Horkheimer’s (1999 [1937]) distinction between traditional and Critical Theory. Tradition
al theory seeks generalizations and law-like regularities, which make society’s patholo
gies appear natural and immutable, thus precluding the possibility of critique. Traditional
theories engage in “problem-solving” within a given framework, rather than questioning
the framework itself (Cox 1981). Realism is a traditional theory: it makes fundamental as
sumptions about a law-like balance of power that emerges from natural anarchy among
states. Linklater (1998) has done much to debunk the Realists’ assumption that the state
is a natural and immutable form. He argues that this assumption unwittingly upholds the
status quo, making us overlook opportunities for emancipation and the fulfilment of rights
made possible by post-Westphalian political forms.
At the same time that scholars were incorporating Critical Theory into international rela
tions, many critical theorists followed Habermas’s lead in extending immanent critique to
international affairs. In the next section, we consider how debates over the end of sover
eignty and rise of cosmopolitanism changed the landscape of Critical Theory.
The End of Sovereignty: Habermasian Critical

Theory
It is widely recognized that in the last thirty years, the forces of globalization have begun
to overtake the boundaries of the Westphalian nation-state, resulting in what Habermas
(2001) calls “the post-national constellation.” While the modern nation-state has enabled
the actualization of valuable social ideals, such as solidarity and self-determination, the
task ahead is to incorporate them into projects for global governance. For Habermas, cos
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mopolitanism offers possibilities for the “inclusion of the other” which go beyond the sin
gularly national sovereigntist imaginary with its own forms of domination and exclusion.
Thus, one important direction taken by Critical Theory is to theorize the politics of inter
national human rights. Linklater (1998) also points out that the totalizing project of the
sovereign state shuts out other possibilities for political community, including regional
and global governance; and so another direction of cosmopolitan Critical Theory has been
to address how governance changes as sovereignty wanes.
The cosmopolitan project is, first and foremost, a legal project that aims to extend
(p. 77)
rights to all persons regardless of national belonging. The imperative of cosmopolitan

right revealed itself in the aftermath of the atrocities and displacements of the Second
World War. The unprecedented crisis of statelessness wrought by the War revealed an
irony, namely that the promise of universal rights accruing to us in virtue of our humanity
alone seemed an empty one. Our bare humanity guaranteed us nothing at all, in the ab
sence of institutions and binding treaties to compel states to respect the rights of the
“stateless.” Hannah Arendt, who in response declared that there must be a “right to have
rights,” was the first to comprehend the conundrum of rightlessness in a world of sover
eign states (Arendt 1976 [1951]).
Arendt’s influence on contemporary Critical Theory is strong in discourses about the

rights of migrants and refugees (e.g. Balibar 2004; Benhabib 2004; Gündogdu 2015). In
2014, the UN declared that for the first time since the Second World War, the number of
refugees in the world has exceeded 50 million; in 2016, that number stood around 65 mil
lion. In the context of growing crisis, the assignment, as well as enactment, of rights have
become primary objectives of normative reconstruction within Critical Theory. As Arendt
understood, state-centred solutions to rightlessness are inadequate. New possibilities
have been opened up by waning sovereignty and the development of international human
rights law (IHRL).
Including the other in an age of mass migration and multiculturalism requires rethinking
the relationship between cosmopolitanism and democratic self-governance (see Chapter
13). Benhabib (2006) suggests that universal human rights should be implemented within
states and municipalities through the jurisgenerative process of democratic iterations, in
which democratic majorities reiterate universal norms, rights, and principles and incorpo
rate them into democratic will-formation through argument, contestation, and revision.
Etienne Balibar’s (2004) Critical Theory of immigration is more sceptical about cosmopoli
tan inclusion. He worries that cosmopolitan integration brings with it a residue of exclu
sion against non-European foreigners, migrants, and refugees. In order to avoid the ris
ing “apartheid in Europe,” Balibar calls for the democratization of bordering practices re
lated to those others—aliens, migrants, refugees—who reside within Europe. His sugges
tion that borders be democratized is not far from Benhabib’s, yet there is a substantial
difference in their optimism about cosmopolitan integration on the European level.
Discourses about the “rights of others” have harked back to Critical Theory’s Marxian
roots by attending to the ways in which the human rights regime is itself the product of
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power, politics, and history. For example, scholars are coming to grips with the ways in
which cosmopolitanism is historically linked to the spread of commercial capitalism
(Douzinas 2007). The EU, for example, originated as a trade community, and its courts are
committed to upholding the “free movement of goods, services, capital and persons,”
sometimes at the cost of democratic politics. The idea that protections for capital and hu
man rights spread together is a problem for Critical Theory. In response, Nancy Fraser
(2009) and others are committed to understanding the ways in which global (p. 78) capi
talism undermines the project of emancipation, and in this context, she has called for a
return to grand social theorizing in the tradition of Marx and Karl Polanyi.
More sceptical lines of critique against cosmopolitanism have turned disillusionment into
the wholesale abandonment of human rights as a political programme. Sam Moyn (2012)
claims that human rights as we understand them now are an invention of the 1970s. Hu
man rights are an anti-political last utopia, a poor replacement for the failed politics of
the past. Moyn’s history papers over alternative narratives of the politicization of human
rights. Sociologists of law, for example, have taken interest in social movements, democ
ratic constituencies, and individuals who, enabled by the human rights regime, have risen
from below in order to make claims, sparking politics by demanding rights (de Sousa San
tos and Rodriguez-Garavito 2005).
A critical theoretical approach to human rights is necessarily democratic. According to

Habermas, rights and democracy are co-original. They require one another, and there
fore, universal human rights and democratic governance beyond the state are inextrica
ble components in any normative reconstruction of the post-national constellation. Cur
rent modes of transnational decision-making and policy have carried on largely without
democratic legitimation, fracturing and obscuring accountability (see Chapters 30 and
34). This also means that under conditions of globalization many communities have no po
litical efficacy vis-à-vis the transnational forces, strong states, and international players
who impact their lives. Nancy Fraser (2009) calls this problem “abnormal justice,” and it
requires that Critical Theory work to reframe justice, i.e. to rethink democracy in cos
mopolitan form.
Habermas’s proposal for cosmopolitan democracy is a three-tiered system of “global gov

ernance without a world government,” which features state, supranational, and transna
tional institutions (Habermas 2008). The supranational level comprises a reformed UN,
which preserves peace and guarantees human rights. At the transnational level, heterar
chical relations among domain-specific organizations and states are bolstered by in
creased democratic legitimacy from regional governance institutions (e.g. EU and NAF
TA). States are retained as the bastions of democratic legitimation; they work to maintain
the functions of welfare in conjunction with regional governance organizations. This mod
el proposes a conception of world politics which takes not only states but also individuals
as the founding subjects of a world constitution.
Postwar Europe has provided Habermas an example of a cosmopolitan model, and it has
also been an experiment in the expansion of the deliberative public sphere beyond the na
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tion-state. In a Habermasian model of democracy, which relies normatively on discourse

ethics, deliberation in the public sphere is a source of legitimation. As publics overtake
the boundaries of their own legislative institutions, the simple correspondence between
deliberation and domestic legislatures has to be amended. In his theory of “republican
cosmopolitanism,” James Bohman (2007) argues that Habermas’s state-centric concep
tion of the demos cannot accommodate emerging transnational publics. By contrast, he
has suggested that we shift the conception of demos to transnational demoi (Bohman
2007)—an idea that embraces the plural nature of emerging global publics and draws at
tention to global legal pluralism, itself (p. 79) an emerging theme of interest (Cohen 2012;
Teubner 1997). He is optimistic that, as deliberation overtakes national boundaries, so
too will corresponding legal and political institutions.
For Hauke Brunkhorst (2005), solidarity motivates civic and legal unity in post-national
deliberating publics. In our age, only solidarity—not nationalism or other particularist ties
—can form the basis of the formal legal-constitutional recognition that underpins cos
mopolitan citizenship. Indeed, constitutional and legal themes have come to the forefront
of Habermasian Critical Theory. William Scheuerman (2016) has even spoken of a “legal
ization of Critical Theory” that has taken place since the publication of Between Facts and
Norms (1996), and which can be found in the development of global constitutionalism as
both a normative ideal and a field of study. As a field, global constitutionalism considers
the ways in which transnational norms and international law crystallize into a constitu
tional order beyond the nation-state, an order that impinges on state sovereignty. The
constitutions of nation-states exist alongside, and sometimes in a productive tension with,
international constitutions. Isiksel (2016) argues that Europe already, in fact, has a func
tional constitution, albeit one that is neither liberal nor democratic in the sense of state
constitution. But can functional constitutions obtain the democratic legitimacy that state
constitutions have? This debate, under way and growing in urgency, is far from settled.
The indeterminate relationship between functional supranational constitutions, interna
tional law, and state constitutions is obscure at the moment and has added to the rise of
global legal pluralism, a topic whose surface critical theorists have only begun to scratch.
Habermasian Critical Theory remains optimistic about these developments, and this opti
mism has not gone unchallenged. It is on exactly these topics that the gap between the
Frankfurt School and post-structural approaches is at its widest. In the next section, we
will see that the crisis of sovereignty following 9/11 has created strange bedfellows and
new divisions within the field of Critical Theory.
Sovereignty at its Limit: Post-structural Re

sponses to the American War on Terror
While a number of critical theorists had embarked on international political theory in the
1990s, it was the events of September 11, 2001 that gathered the field en masse around
topics of international terror and American foreign policy. The politics of the George W.
Bush administration exposed the dark side of globalization, bringing forth trenchant and
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vociferous critiques of purportedly false universals, including cosmopolitanism itself

(Douzinas 2007). Furthermore, American actions in “war on terror” and abuses of execu
tive prerogative have called into question the waning of sovereignty assumed by early in
ternational Critical Theory.
In the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, Habermas and Derrida sat separately
(p. 80)
with Giovanna Borradori to give interviews on terror and terrorism (Borradori 2003). Giv
en their previous disagreements on fundamental philosophical issues, the Borradori inter
views represent a remarkable convergence in which the two leading critical theorists, as
representatives of Europe, respond to oncoming geopolitical crisis. For Derrida, terrorism
is the outgrowth of “autoimmunarity,” i.e. the self-defeating nature of Western power
turned back on itself. Habermas points to the extreme inequality wrought by globaliza
tion, which leads to discontent and violence, exposing the unfinished nature of the En
lightenment project. Worried about excessive American sovereignty, both direct their
hopes to the possibility of strengthening international law and creating cosmopolitan con
ditions of hospitality. Amidst the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, they also penned a joint let
ter in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which they identified Europe as specially po
sitioned to advance “a cosmopolitan order on the basis of international law” against
American unilateralism (Derrida and Habermas 2003).
They were right to fear that an attack on US soil would cause the American sovereign to
rear its head. Ironically, waning sovereignty and new, insidious exertions of sovereignty
have appeared to develop in tandem. For example, Wendy Brown (2010) has noted that
the waning of sovereignty has been accompanied by a vast proliferation of border walls
and the securitization of borders. Nationalists, backed into a corner by globalization, lash
out at foreigners and attempt to fortify the crumbling borders of their world against
forces of change.
Post-structuralist scholars have focused intensely on issues of sovereign violence (Bargu

2014; Hutchings and Frazer 2011a; 2011b), and Derridian and Lacanian variations of psy
choanalysis have assumed prominence among responses to millennial geopolitics (Butler
2016; Zizek 2002). The dark side of sovereignty reveals itself in extra-legal abuses of ex
ecutive power, such as the extra-territorial detention and torture of “enemy combatants”
at Guantanamo Bay. For Agamben (2005), sovereignty is part of a system in which extra-
legal action is already inscribed into the liberal constitutional order. Following Carl
Schmitt’s theory of the “state of exception,” he shows how the sovereign is able to impose
its will beyond the pale of the law. In Political Theology (1985 [1922]), Schmitt had
claimed, among other things, that the sovereign reveals itself by claiming the power to
make a decision during a state of exception. Accordingly, Agamben observes the revela
tion of sovereignty when states enact violence in extra-legal spaces like Guantanamo.
Agamben is not the only one to draw influence from the brilliant and infamous Nazi legal
theorist. Schmitt has enjoyed an ebb and flow of popularity among political theorists
since his works started to appear in English translation in the 1980s. His oeuvre, often
controversially, has lent itself to the zeitgeist on a number of topics in Critical Interna
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tional Political Theory. Marxist scholars who have employed his concept of the political to
critique liberalism have been termed “Left-Schmittians.” In particular, Chantal Mouffe
(2000) has advocated using Schmitt’s (1996 [1927]) concept of the political—the antago
nistic distinction between friend and foe—as the basis of agonistic democratic theory.
Carl Schmitt was an ardent critic of liberalism, calling it a depoliticizing façade that
masks real power. For Mouffe, this critique can be extended not only to the disingenuous
ness of American liberal internationalism but also to liberal cosmopolitanism per se.
The Schmittian critique of liberal cosmopolitanism is that, like US hegemony, it

(p. 81)
creates unipolarity. Cosmopolitans seek to unify the world order under international law—
a move that some think masks the ambitions of power-players behind the seemingly be
nign mission of human rights. Even those wary of Schmitt’s politics have at times invoked
his account of the “pluriversum,” in which powers on the world stage balance each other
out (Buck-Morss 2008). If American sovereignty will not submit to the constraints of in
ternational law, perhaps it could at least be balanced out. Jean Cohen has suggested that
such a pluriverse of equal sovereignty could be achieved in conjunction with international
law (Cohen 2012). Schmitt himself would have contested the compatibility of a political
pluriversum and international law. He hoped that balance would be reinstated after the
War through the division of the world into great spaces (Großräume), which would coun
teract the disproportionate accumulation by any one power block (Schmitt 2006 [1950]).
Scholars have noted that through his influence on Hans Morgenthau and other early IR
theorists, Schmitt’s ideas about the geopolitical balance of power have been influential
for theories of Realism (Koskenniemi 2002; Scheuerman 1999). Therefore, the popularity
of Schmitt among critical international political theorists is surprising, considering their
opposition to Realism (e.g. Linklater 1998).
In the end, the turn to Schmitt cannot help but be a turn against cosmopolitanism. The
theme that unifies his enormous oeuvre is his critique of liberal universalism. Universal
ism lies at the heart of cosmopolitanism, even when cosmopolitanism is conceived as a
political project of democratic movements claiming and reiterating rights from below. As
Jurkevics (2016) points out in a comparison with Arendt’s geopolitics, the Schmittian
worldview is not compatible with critical theories of cosmopolitanism. In The Divided
West, Habermas poses the future world order as a choice between Schmitt and Kant, be
tween the unbounded competition for power among hemispheric powers on the one hand,
and the constitutionalization of international law on the other (Habermas 2006). The
choice that Habermas presents is, in essence, between preserving state-centred sover
eignty or surpassing it.
There is yet another dimension to the critique of cosmopolitanism, which we explore in

the next section, and that is the critique of international law as a project of empire. We
will see that, within Critical Theory, some have moved from the critique of cosmopoli
tanism as empire to the claim that preserving (equal) sovereignty is, in fact, the route to
emancipation.
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Return to Sovereignty: The Equal Sovereignty

of States against Empire
The critique of empire brings together critical and post-colonial theory, the latter under
stood as a broad set of literatures interested in imperialism and the fate of formerly colo
nized societies. One of the best-known critiques of empire comes from Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri (2000). Hardt and Negri differentiate between imperialism and (p. 82) em
pire in order to capture the logic of the international system. Imperialism is a violent and
exploitative system which enables alien power to impose its will on (and plunder) another
society. “Empire,” on the other hand, refers to an anonymous network of rules, regula
tions, and structures that serve global capitalism. The creeping power of empire threat
ens to undermine other social logics; it puts into place a seemingly immoveable structure
of domination, against which diffuse peoples, understood as “the multitude,” must rebel.
But which institutions are not complicit in empire? By including all current forms of inter
national law and post-national governance, Hardt and Negri make the emancipatory as
pect of their programme questionable.
Other theorists have investigated the history of imperialism and its implications for West
ern emancipatory philosophy. For example, Thomas McCarthy shifts Frankfurt-style theo
ry away from Western societies with his careful history of the co-implication of liberalism
and imperialism in his work Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (2009).
While Habermas focuses on Kant’s legal thought, McCarthy reminds us of Kant’s insidi
ous writings on race and hierarchy. The historical interrelatedness of liberalism and racist
imperialism does not deter McCarthy from emancipatory possibilities—he formulates a
Critical Theory of development against imperialism. Susan Buck-Morss (2009) has also
shed light on the connections between European philosophy and the legacies of imperial
ism. She brings Hegel’s master–slave dialectic to bear on an analysis of revolutions, en
gaging in what she calls “universal history.” She considers how the ideals of the French
Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity—only first actualized in the Haitian revolution.
Buck-Morss’s study is important because it brings our attention to domination as a literal
problem of slavery in colonial societies.
One response to the critique of empire has been to embrace the sovereign equality of
states. The origins of sovereign equality can be found in the era of decolonization, at a
time when the guarantee of a formal equality of states on the world stage—and the con
comitant seat in the general assembly of the UN—was a vast improvement for formerly
colonized states. The principle of sovereign equality entails respect for self-determination
and non-intervention. Jean Cohen (2012) measures this principle, which aims to secure a
seat at the bargaining table for weak states, against the imperial dimensions of interna
tional law. For her, sovereign equality is an indispensable bastion of self-determination
against the encroachment of empire. According to Cohen, instead of overcoming sover
eignty, we should embrace it. However, this does not amount to the abandonment of inter
national law.
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Christina Lafont (2015) has also argued that it is possible to conceive of sovereign equali
ty and international law as mutually reinforcing. She shows how the Responsibility to Pro
tect doctrine (R2P) has been invoked by domestic populations as a defence against en
croachments from transnational corporations and the WTO. Domestic actors have claimed
that enforcing transnational regulations, which are adopted to serve the interests of glob
al capital, can undermine their ability to protect their own populations. Such cases show
that the interventionist intentions of R2P can be subverted by domestic actors in the
name of self-determination. Lafont’s contribution points to the idea that we need not
abandon the growing human rights regime in order to preserve (p. 83) self-determination.
New theories in this vein have helped to break down the exaggerated dichotomy between
sovereignty and cosmopolitanism (Benhabib 2016). While international law may weaken
state sovereignty, it can enhance popular sovereignty within states. Benhabib has empha
sized that transnational human rights can be claimed by marginalized and excluded
groups and individuals to make a state more democratic, thus strengthening the ability of
the people to govern themselves under conditions of globalization (Benhabib 2016).
While popular sovereignty and cosmopolitanism need not be at odds, external state sover
eignty and post-national integration are not as easily reconciled. In the context of Europe,
the call for a return to sovereignty is particularly loaded, as it would be tantamount to the
dissolution of the EU. Nowhere is this tension more apparent than in the controversy over
Brexit. The stakes of this debate are brought into relief in the recent debate between
Wolfgang Streeck and Habermas over the future of Europe in the wake of monetary cri
sis. Streeck (2013) calls for the dissolution of the European Monetary Union (EMU),
which tethers states together through shared currency and monetary policy. He claims
that when strong states, i.e. Germany, implement austerity and control inflation rates, it
causes weaker states to lose control of their welfare states, since they cannot engage in
inflationary measures to maintain their levels of social spending. The southern European
governments are strapped by the union, and lose control of domestic democratic politics.
Habermas’s (2013) response is to hold steadfast: the EU should be democratized through
the strengthening of the European legislature and by moving from a monetary to a fiscal
union. A return to state sovereignty is nostalgic, and underestimates the inability of con
temporary states to maintain democracy apart from post-national integration. As the de
mocratization of the European Union stalls, questions about post-national integration are
left troublingly unanswered.
Reconfiguring Sovereignty: Critical Theory at a

Crossroads
Globalization has forced international issues onto Critical Theory’s agenda, and they are
unlikely to abate. Where is Critical International Political Theory headed? With regard to
the debates outlined in this chapter, the discord in responses to the crises of the twenty-
first century suggests that state sovereignty may be neither the promise nor the patholo
gy of our era. The split between sovereigntist and cosmopolitan camps might soften in
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normative theories, as we see in the latest research (Benhabib 2016). Yet the praxis of
sovereignty and post-national integration will likely remain controversial, and disagree
ments over the praxis of post-national politics are likely to proliferate. What is clear is
that state sovereignty is no longer monolithic. The complete return to a pre-globalized
world is not possible, and a more fruitful route for theory/practice lies (p. 84) in rethink
ing the institutional configuration of a world order that is already decidedly post-national.
Cosmopolitanism from below is promising in this respect. Sociologists of law have paid
special attention to social movements that strategically target national and sub-national
democratic institutions for the implementation of human rights norms (Benhabib 2011; de
Sousa Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito 2005). Critical Theory’s interdisciplinary methodol
ogy lends itself to the incorporation of new empirical research on grassroots cosmopoli
tanism. International law is an important resource for social movements in weak states,
and its capacity to strengthen democratic self-determination—along the lines of Lafont’s
suggestion—deserves more attention. If we resist the temptation to understand sover
eignty as assigning a jurisdiction the last and final say, and instead look to state bound
aries as sites of implementation and iteration, it is possible to see how the relationship
between states and international law can be normatively reconstructed towards emanci
pation.
A Critical Theory of international affairs demands attention to law, but does continued fo
cus on the legal dimensions of globalization lead Critical Theory too far from the original
project of theorizing the social totality? Some worry that contemporary Critical Theory
suffers from a lack of social theory, and has given itself over to “legalism” and “moral
ism.” However, sociologists of law would not agree that to study law is necessarily to
abandon social theory. A critical approach requires an eye to the social and economic con
ditions that both determine law’s structure and, in turn, are influenced by law. It is true
that most contemporary Critical Theory has not engaged in a total critique of capitalism.
Compared to earlier generations of the Frankfurt School, current theory has a subdued
tone with regard to the seemingly untamable ravages of global capitalism. Emancipation
as the complete transformation of the economic order is no longer on the agenda. In lieu
of such possibilities, emancipation has been sought in the transformation of legal orders
and democratic control over transnational institutions. As the EU matures, international
courts continue to develop, and international human rights law (IHRL) increasingly binds
the actions of states, it is no wonder that critical theorists have focused on the emancipa
tory potential of law.
Still, with regard to cosmopolitan, post-national integration, Critical Theory stands at a

crossroads, and the road forward is indeed unclear. The challenge is to establish whether
principles and values associated with democracies housed in nation-states—i.e. self-gov
ernment, transparency, accountability, and solidarity—can be extended to transnational
institutions increasingly spreading in our world. Critical Theory’s self-reflexive impulse—
to inspect the conditions of critique itself—turns critique back on itself. Is Critical Theory
Page 11 of 15

capable of overcoming “methodological nationalism,” in Ulrich Beck’s (2006) words, and

moving toward a Critical Theory of the transnational and the new global?
If the proliferation of different modes of critique and debates over the future of the sover
eign state persist, then this may simply be a sign that the tradition of the Frankfurt
School—its heirs and opponents alike—is flourishing in response to the continued differ
entiation of system, lifeworld, and the global public.
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Zizek, S. (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Re
lated Dates (London: Verso).
Anna Jurkevics
Anna Jurkevics is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the

University of British Columbia.
Seyla Benhabib
Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor for Political Science and Philosophy in
the Department of Political Science at Yale University.
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Critical International Political Theory

Critical International Political Theory

Print Publication Date: Mar 2018

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

Critical Theory and International Relations

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

Furthermore, contemporary international political theorists such as Robert Cox, Andrew

The End of Sovereignty: Habermasian Critical

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

rights to all persons regardless of national belonging. The imperative of cosmopolitan

Arendt’s influence on contemporary Critical Theory is strong in discourses about the

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

A critical theoretical approach to human rights is necessarily democratic. According to

Habermas’s proposal for cosmopolitan democracy is a three-tiered system of “global gov­

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

tion-state. In a Habermasian model of democracy, which relies normatively on discourse

Sovereignty at its Limit: Post-structural Re­

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

vociferous critiques of purportedly false universals, including cosmopolitanism itself

Post-structuralist scholars have focused intensely on issues of sovereign violence (Bargu

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

The Schmittian critique of liberal cosmopolitanism is that, like US hegemony, it

There is yet another dimension to the critique of cosmopolitanism, which we explore in

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

Return to Sovereignty: The Equal Sovereignty

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

Reconfiguring Sovereignty: Critical Theory at a

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

Still, with regard to cosmopolitan, post-national integration, Critical Theory stands at a

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

capable of overcoming “methodological nationalism,” in Ulrich Beck’s (2006) words, and

Balibar, E. (2004). We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship

Beck, U. (2006). The Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity).

Benhabib, S. (2006). Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Benhabib, S. (2011). Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times (Cambridge:

Borradori, G. (2003). Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas

Brunkhorst, H. (2005). Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community

Butler, J. (2016). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso).

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

Devetak, R. (2009). Critical Theory. In A. Linklater, S. Burchill, R. Devetak, et al. (eds),

Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of

Habermas, J. (2001). The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge, Mass.:

Habermas, J. (2006). The Divided West (Cambridge: Polity).

Habermas, J. (2008). The Constitutionalization of International Law and the Legiti­

mation Problems of a Constitution for a World Society. Constellations 15: 444–55.

Isiksel, T. (2016). Europe’s Functional Constitution: A Theory of Constitutionalism Beyond

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

Linklater, A. (1998). The Transformation of the Political Community: Ethical Foundations

Mouffe, C. (2000). The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso).

Scheuerman, W. (2017). Recent Frankfurt Critical Theory: Down on Law? Constellations

Streeck, W. (2013). Gekaufte Zeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp).

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

Anna Jurkevics is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 22 July 2022

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Habermas’s proposal for cosmopolitan democracy is a three-tiered system of “global gov

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