ON RECONCILING NATIONAL DIVERSITY WITH COSMOPOLITAN UNITY

Thomas McCarthy, Northwestern University (III-A)

Though nationalism has been at the heart of democratic politics since the late eighteenth century, it has only recently become a focus of normative political theory. Theoretical attention has confirmed the impression left by current events: nationalism and liberalism are profoundly in tension. This paper deals with one aspect of the tension, the apparently irreconcilable opposition between liberal universalism and nationalist particularism. Indeed, Enlightenment cosmopolitanism has been a favorite target of theorists emphasizing the values of culture and nationality. In particular, Kant's cosmopolitanism has been represented as an exemplar of the sort of difference-blind universalism that cannot hope to do justice to a multicultural world; and Habermas has been faulted for propagating the same abstract universalism in another conceptual guise. This paper argues that that common understanding of Kant and Habermas is a fundamental misunderstanding. Both attempt to accommodate in their ideas of cosmopolitical justice not only cultural diversity but even identification with national political communities. Habermas's version, especially as developed in Die Einbeziehung des Anderen [1996, English translation forthcoming], is a theoretically promising reconceptualization of the nation state that makes it compatible with the liberal conception of political community as based on the agreement of free and equal individuals and with the cosmopolitan conception of a global political community under the rule of law. There are, to be sure, a host of issues that remain to be discussed.