Abstract
How is distributive justice possible with respect to immigration if political decisions about entry and membership cannot be grounded in the symmetry of a prior commonality, human or otherwise, that could guarantee reciprocal relations between members and nonmembers? This paper deals with both aspects of this question. Initially, it engages critically with Seyla Benhabib's plea for ‘dialogical universalism,’ showing why the strong discontinuity between political and moral reciprocity precludes understanding distributive justice as the process of mediating between political particularity and moral universality. Subsequently, it suggests that a way out of this conceptual and normative impasse can be found in the fact that boundaries create a double asymmetry. This double asymmetry is constitutive for the ‘dia’ of the political dialogue that separates and joins members and nonmembers. This ‘in between,’ which eludes control by the parties to a dialogue, is the realm of distributive justice.
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Notes
Although Benhabib also distinguishes between theories of justice and theories of distributive justice, such that the former include issues of status, whereas the latter do not, I refer to distributive justice as encompassing distributive issues with respect to status.
See also Benhabib (2007) and other papers in the same number of the European Journal of Political Theory devoted to a discussion of Benhabib's position on immigration and distributive justice.
‘Human rights are juridical by their very nature. What lends them the appearance of moral rights is … their mode of validity, which points beyond the legal orders of nation-states’ (Habermas, 2005, p. 190).
In this vein, Cohen's and Sabel's model of ‘deliberative polyarchy’ has difficulties in dealing with the conceptual and normative problems that immigration poses for theories of democracy and distributive justice. As the authors define it, ‘what makes deliberative polyarchy polyarchic is its use of situated deliberation within decision-making units and deliberative comparisons across those units …’ (Cohen and Sabel, 2005, p. 780; see also Cohen and Sabel, 1997). For, in terms of the paradox of democratic legitimacy, the problem is not only assuring deliberation within a pre-given unit or comparisons across units but rather what sense can be made of ‘deliberation’ about civic and spatial boundaries between citizens and would-be immigrants, given the asymmetry between insiders and outsiders that governs political deliberation.
Benhabib by no means stands alone here. Two prominent contributions to the debate on immigration and cosmopolitan justice that also endorse this assumption are Carens (1987) and Bader (2005). The works of Pogge and Beitz cited above also embrace this assumption, albeit in the context of a somewhat different set of problems pertaining to cosmopolitan justice.
This formulation encompasses both acts of constituent and of constituted power; more precisely, acts that claim to be the legal articulation of a common or collective interest have to a lesser or greater extent a paradoxical structure: acts of constituent power can only innovate if they succeed in presenting themselves as acts of constituted power. See (Lindahl, 2007) for a fuller description of the paradox of constituent power.
In the forthcoming I will not distinguish between the EU and the European (Economic) Community, as nothing of importance for my paper turns on this distinction.
See (Waldenfels, 1994, p. 197) for the notion of a ‘preference in the difference.’
The logic of boundaries, as sketched out heretofore, strongly supports Bonnie Honig's claim that the temporal register of infinite progress endorsed by Benhabib's cosmopolitanism views limits as that which ‘is always already about to be overcome.’ Honig correctly argues that this interpretation of limits systematically blocks understanding as such the ‘remainders’ produced by every conceivable polity, including the EU (Honig, 2006, pp. 113–114).
The inclusive exclusiveness and exclusive inclusiveness of boundaries both supports and challenges Rob Walker's critique of the split between political theory and international relations theory. The acuteness of Walker's diagnosis notwithstanding, the question that remains unanswered in his critique is whether the distinction between inside and outside in terms of the domestic and the foreign is constitutive for politics. The upshot of the logic of boundaries, as described in my paper, is (1) that the distinction between inside and outside is constitutive for politics in the form of the distinction between, respectively, own and strange places, and (2) that these two forms of the inside/outside distinction are irreducible to each other: if foreign places need not be strange, strange places can erupt in what a polity calls its domestic territory (Lindahl, 2006). The logic of boundaries not only entails that ‘political life occurs in space’ (Walker, 1993, p. 127, emphasis added), but also, and more radically, between spaces. As will hopefully become increasing clear in the course of the argument, my discussion of the structure of boundaries aims to make sense of the political ‘in between’ at stake in border crossings by immigrants. To give a new twist to the subtitle of Walker's book, discussing the logic of boundaries in the framework of international relations, would seek to understand why and how the political ‘in between’ conditions the possibility of ‘international relations as political theory’ (emphasis added).
The forthcoming analysis is quite close to what Isin calls a ‘genealogy of citizenship,’ understood as the process of ‘becoming political,’ namely ‘that moment when one constitutes oneself as a being capable of judgment about just and unjust, takes responsibility for that judgment, and associates oneself with or against other in fulfilling that responsibility’ (Isin, 2002, p. 276).
In a sense, this way of dealing with normative claims raised by immigration would come close, if institutionalized, to Habermas's plea for a global polity that deals with issues in which a global interest is at stake. But I sharply take issue with Habermas's assumption that a global democratic and constitutional polity would have no outside, such that politics becomes, as he puts it, ‘global domestic politics’ – Weltinnenpolitik (Habermas, 2005, p. 126). Although a global polity would have no outside in the sense of foreign territories located beyond its reach, or at least not initially, the inclusion and exclusion of interests required to institute the territory of a global polity would ensure that it harbors, at least latently, strange places in what it calls its own territory.
See Waldenfels (1994) for a careful study of the temporal paradoxes involved in the relation between question and response.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was written with the financial support of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. I greatly appreciate comments to an earlier version of this paper by Zenon Bankowski, Emilios Christodoulidis, Luigi Corrias, Bonnie Honig, Ivana Ivkovic, David Janssens, Nanda Oudejans, Bert van Roermund, Andy Schaap, Neil Walker, and two anonymous referees.
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An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2010.42.
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Lindahl, H. In between: Immigration, distributive justice, and political dialogue. Contemp Polit Theory 8, 415–434 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.50
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.50