fit his idealized principles of legal equality and merit. Honneth's dismissal of the politics of cultural difference has consequences for his international thought. By taking the existence of firmly established states for granted, he underestimates how some multicultural struggles call into question the very identity and even the boundaries of the political community in which
procedures and values more or less in play in most other zones of contemporary Australian society. But it can also be approached as a product of those procedures, practices and values. These two approaches are in complex tension with each other. The way we weigh patterns of politically generated suffering, so that generations of Aboriginal ill-health and early death, often from violence, seem so extraordinarily less grave than the killings in Tiananmen Square, is itself in part informed by a Lockean language of self-possessed individuality, political community and
comprehensive conception of democratic inclusion for democratic polities. Projecting such a comprehensive conception to the global level is in my view deeply problematic. However, this does not rule out a thinner conception of global democracy that relies only on the principle of including affected interests without aiming to build a global government and to forge humanity into a single political community. Global democracy in this sense should be
entities within the nation-state. Lars Ove Trans follows the repatriation of the corpse of a dead Mexican migrant worker from his home in the USA to his community of origin in the state of Oaxaca. As a recent phenomenon, the federal Mexican state supports the repatriation of corpses for burial in Mexican soil, once more showing how burial may be taken as the ‘ultimate test of belonging’ (Geshiere 2005). However, migrants have multiple sites of belonging and often uphold partial membership of several political communities. Therefore the repatriation of the migrant corpse
citizenship not just because we regard them as future citizens. If this were the case, one might as well wait until they have reached the age of majority and consider them until then subjects within the jurisdiction who have a claim to equal protection. The reason why we recognize them as citizens is that political communities are transgenerational human societies. The status of membership in such communities is
, Bataille points to the fear of death and the attempts of authorities to ameliorate and control the powers of abjection of dead bodies as constitutive elements in relation to political communities. Unlike many other attempts at identifying the defining traits of sovereignty, Bataille understands sovereignty as an effect of practice rather than seeing a sovereign will as the source of sovereignty. He may easily be criticised for the unmistakably vitalist tenor of his fascination with the decision, excess and (disregard of) death, and his corresponding critique of the dull
emphatically nationalistic forms of political community and by crafting a vision of postnational political community as the normative potential of our age. One of the markers of critical theory, as Habermas understood it, was to recognise that overcoming antisemitism lies at the centre of any worthwhile project of European reconstruction. 12 Jürgen Habermas: antisemitism and the postnational project Habermas conceived the postnational
possible agenda must be included in the demos” (p. 22). 3 Taken literally, this would mean that the demos must be global in scope, since any decision taken by a less inclusive body is liable to affect the interests of at least some outsiders, and Bauböck recoils from this conclusion, arguing that democracy presupposes the existence of a plurality of bounded political communities. Nevertheless, he concedes to the defenders of AAI that “those whose interests are
distinguished from questions about membership, so that ASC cannot be used tout court as a guide to the allocation of citizenship. Finally, I share many of Bauböck's views about who ought to be granted citizenship in a democratic political community and why. He prefers the language of stakeholdership (ACS) and I prefer the language of social membership in exploring these issues, but in substantive terms our views of what democratic principles entail
expectations. The politics of identity In the international system, membership of a political community has traditionally been institutionalised spatially within territorial states (Krasner 1988 ). Foreign policy follows as a consequence of a political community being recognised as a sovereign state and is thus an essential confirmation of its identity by other sovereign actors. Wallace (1991 : 65) has called this the