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European Journal of Social Theory 4(1): 41–52

Copyright © 2001 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

Cosmopolitanism and Violence

The Limits of Global Civil Society
Gerard Delanty
UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, UK

Abstract
The problem of violence for social theory is not only a normative question
which can be answered in political-ethical terms, but it is also a cognitive
question relating to the definition of violence. This cognitive question is one
of the main problems with the contemporary discourse of violence and it is
this that makes the idea of a cosmopolitan public sphere particularly relevant
since it is in public discourse that cognitive models are articulated. The real
power of cosmopolitanism lies in communicative power, the problematizing,
the reflexive transformation of cultural models and the raising of ‘voice’.
Unless global civil society is based on a cosmopolitan political sphere there
is the danger that it will be disembodied and helpless in the face of new
forms of violence.

Key words
■ cultural models ■ globalization ■ public sphere ■ values ■ war

If the cosmopolitan vision is to have any real impact in the world it will have to
address the problem of violence. But this may be to ask too much of it, for the
cosmopolitan idea has been very much shaped by a vision of the world as a peace-
ful place. This, too, is one of the limits of sociology which emerged in relatively
peaceful times and was animated by a vision of social order in a world of sover-
eign nation-states. These ways of thinking may be reaching their limits today in
a world characterized by globalization and the emergence of postmodern politi-
cal violence. One response has been in demands for a global civil society and
indeed also a globally oriented social science. What these calls share is a sense of
the urgency of a new global normative system based on a legal framework and
new institutions of governance. This article is addressed to the question of violent
conflicts over fundamental issues of group identity and values that has been part
of what I shall be calling postmodern political violence. It assesses the prospects
of a cosmopolitan resolution on the level of values as opposed to the more
conventional level of norms in the politico-legal order. I am offering a defence of
the idea of a cosmopolitan public sphere while being more critical of the prospect
of a global civil society. My contention is that civil societies as well as legal and

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42 European Journal of Social Theory 4(1)

political institutions of governance can be sustained without recourse to violence

only when there is a prior public domain of communication in existence.
The distinction between the concepts of the public sphere and civil society
is frequently confused and most of the arguments for cosmopolitanism advo-
cate some notion of a global civil society.1 But the distinction is an important
one and allows us to evade some of the problems of cosmopolitanism as a
normative version of globalization. To follow Jürgen Habermas, the public
sphere is prior to civil society and is to be understood as the domain of civic
communication and cultural contestation; civil society on the other hand refers
to more specific forms of mobilization and citizenship participation which have
some relation to the state (Habermas, 1989, 1996, 1998a, 1998b). Cosmo-
politan public spheres come into existence when transnational, national or local
public spheres enter into contact with each other and undergo change as a result
(Bohman, 1997, 1998). This is quite distinct from the question of civil society
as a legal and political form of transnational governance, for it is a matter of
cultural transformation in the values and norms of social and civic relations. A
cosmopolitan public sphere gives rise to a limited kind of cosmopolitanism
which can be contrasted to the broader political and legal conceptions of cosmo-
politanism as transnational governance. A cosmopolitan or global civil society
can of course also come about, but this is a different kind of cosmopolitanism
whose possibilities are limited to the tasks of government – the rule of law and
public administration – and governance – the political assertion of civil society.
This idea of cosmopolitanism, in sum, is a qualified kind of cosmopolitanism,
one that is cautious about the possibility of a global civil society. The real power
of cosmopolitanism lies in communicative power, that is in the problematizing,
the reflexive transformation of cultural models and the raising of ‘voice’
(Hirschman, 1970). Unless global civil society is based on a cosmopolitan politi-
cal sphere – which can be on subnational, national and transnational levels –
there is the danger that it will be disembodied and helpless in the face of new
forms of violence. What many commentators fail to note about postmodern
political violence is the absence of an acceptable means of defining political
violence. This cognitive question is one of the main problems with the contem-
porary discourse of violence and it is this that makes the idea of a cosmopolitan
public sphere particularly relevant, since it is in public discourse that cognitive
models are articulated (Strydom, 1999).

War and Cognitive Models

The Kosovo war was important in drawing attention to the cognitive dimension
of war: it opened up a moral debate on the nature of war that was far-reaching.
Some of the implications of this debate in fact went beyond the ethical level in
highlighting cultural questions concerning the nature of war and legitimate
violence. In this context what is important is the fact that some of the greatest
problems about violence concern its cultural definition: today there are deep
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Gerard Delanty Cosmopolitanism and Violence 43

divisions about exactly what constitutes violence (see Aijmer and Abbink, 2000).
For instance, the discourse of war around the Kosovo episode was one of uncer-
tainty about the cognitive status of war and how it should be viewed in relation
to other historical events of large-scale violence: was it a ‘purge’, a ‘genocide’, a
‘war’, a ‘civil war’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘forced expulsion’? The use of these terms
and the contestation over them was a striking aspect of the war which lacked a
clear definition of violence as well as of such terms as who was the victim and
who was perpetrator. Related to this was uncertainty over the constitution of the
‘we’ who are responsible. As a result the moral and legal obligation to intervene
was severely limited. As the war progressed, the nature of the subject of responsi-
bility, the object of politics and whether moral obligation must lead to political
obligation became more and more uncertain. Consequently, the question of the
cultural presuppositions of violence cannot be avoided, forcing social theory to
rethink the theoretical constitution of its object.
What I am drawing attention to is the need to address basic questions concern-
ing cultural values since violence is not always an empirical, objective reality but
a matter of cultural construction in the context of publicly shaped discourses and
is generally defined by reference to an issue. Thus what is particularly striking
today is the opening up of a discourse of violence around a whole range of new
issues that did not previously exist: violence against children, violence against
women, violence against nature, various kinds of rages and the uses of technology
in the conduct of war, for instance. The question of violence may be said to be
one of the central dimensions to cosmopolitanism as a public and cultural
discourse. War is becoming more and more a cognitive issue as a result of media
coverage for the many people who are not directly effected by war. Social reality
is experienced through cultural forms which frame or construct reality. Thus
distance is central to the experience of most kinds of reality, making unavoidable
a constructivist approach for the social scientist (Strydom, 1999). For example,
as Luc Boltanski has argued in an important study, images of suffering are be-
coming more common today as a result of media coverage, and consequently
suffering is experienced as more distant (Boltanski, 1999). This suggests too that
the discourse of suffering can become more open to multiple codifications, as in
the case of the globalization of the Holocaust (Sznaider, forthcoming). There is,
then, an unavoidable cultural or cognitive dimension to war and the discourses
that it has given rise to.
How we think about violence is changing today and it might be suggested
this is because of the expansion in discourses of justification on the nature of
responsibility. While transnational discourses of justification are becoming more
important, there is also the expansion in new modes of justification involving
non-state actors. The idea of violence in modern social and political thought is
thus losing its relevance. Violence has generally been conceived as primordial-
ism, as in Girard (1981) following Freud, or as in Levinas as non-recognition of
the other. From Hobbes to Carl Schmitt and Max Weber, violence was prior to
the normative order of the state where legitimate authority resides. According
to Weber,
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44 European Journal of Social Theory 4(1)

. . . today the use of force is regarded as legitimate only in so far as it is either permitted
by the state or prescribed by it. Thus the right of a father to discipline his children is
recognized – a survival of the former independent authority of the head of a
household, which in the right to use force has sometimes extended to a power of life
and death over children and slaves. The claim of the modern state to monopolize the
use of force is as essential to it as its character of compulsory jurisdiction and of
continuous operation. (Weber, 1998: 56)

The Weberian image was one of a political and social order that has progressively
eradicated violence by the civilizing force of legitimate authority (Joas, 1999).
The problem that war and violence present for social theory in the first instance
is that of the theoretical constitution of the object. The example of Kosovo suggests
that not only have the older models of justification proved inadequate but so too
have the existing cognitive models. The definition of war has become a problem
as a result of the entry of new social actors in the definition of the problem. Since
the Vietnam war, when the public for the first time became active in the justifi-
cation of war, there has been a growing contestation about war. Kosovo
represented a slightly different variant of this as a result of divided support for mili-
tary intervention within a global context. The European liberal left was deeply
divided over the question of intervention, with many well-known intellectuals
associated with the left supporting it and others denouncing military intervention.
This is itself a matter of considerable interest and may be an expression of the
collapse of a common political-critical standpoint based on underlying normative
principles and which may be constitutive of a left-wing discourse. While many
intellectuals as well as members of the public may share a commitment to moral-
normative principles, politics and critique have become more and more uncertain
as a result of the changing cultural context in which both morality and politics are
situated. It is this deeper cognitive context in which the discourse of violence is
located that I am drawing attention to in this article. My argument is that the
problem of violence for social theory is not only a normative question which can
be answered in political-ethical terms, but it is also a cognitive question relating
to the definition of violence. Moral and political philosophy undoubtedly has a
lot that is important to say on the subject, but for social theory a striking aspect
of the current situation of political violence is the cultural definition of violence.
The justification of legitimate violence, military intervention in this case, has been
complicated by the emergence of new discourses of justification which do not rest
on the conventional definition of political violence as involving a clear subject and
object, self and other. Thus what I find challenging for social theory is not whether
there has been a quantifiable increase in political violence, but that there is a shift
occurring in the discourse of war which can be related to the changing nature of
war. This is not surprising as wars have often been occasions of major cognitive
shifts in the cultural models of society. The end of the seventeenth-century wars
of religion, the Napoleonic wars, and the Second World War, for example, have
marked the emergence, respectively, of the Westphalian order of sovereign states,
the republican order of constitutional states and the international order of nation-
states.
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Gerard Delanty Cosmopolitanism and Violence 45

The idea of international society, centred on the United Nations, was the basis
of the normative system that existed over the latter half of the twentieth century
and was designed to prevent major occurrences of war between sovereign nation-
states. It was a conception of international society based on a tacit normative
system resting on international law but in reality resting on the ability of indi-
vidual states to uphold this framework. International law thus depended ulti-
mately on its moral force and the existence of a normative-legal order within the
nation-state. It was embedded in a strong belief in the feasibility of negotiated
conflict resolution rather than recourse to the exercise of force. The problem we
are faced with today is that international society and its normative system is in
crisis as a result of the emergence of forms of violent conflict which call into ques-
tion the institutions of modernity, in particular the existence of a normative order
ultimately resting on the state. In this situation negotiated conflict resolution is
becoming more difficult given that its premises are being eroded. War today is
no longer led by states alone; it is led by organizations that have been in part
nurtured by the state but operate outside its jurisdiction and in some cases, as in
some post-communist societies, may gain control over the apparatus of state.

From Modern to Postmodern Political Violence

In this section I outline some aspects of the changing nature of political violence,
beginning with some remarks on negotiated conflict resolution. The central issue
here concerns the viability of a normative order upheld by the state. Central to
any normative order is the possibility of the negotiated resolution of conflict.
Before commenting on the significance of postmodern political violence, a few
words on negotiated conflict resolution are in order.
In such disputes the confrontation is not very great and can be solved by
reasonable means, such as by compromise or by agreeing to disagree. This is
reflected in Rawls’s notion of the search for an ‘overlapping consensus’ or in
Habermas’s notion of the ‘force of the better argument’ or procedural justice
(Rawls, 1987; Habermas, 1998a). In the case of large-scale conflicts concerning
the very nature of the society, such as conflicts over national sovereignty, the
dispute can be solved by parliamentary or constitutionally approved means. In
these cases, while there may be deep divisions on values, there is generally a shared
normative order and always a functioning political and legal order. It is of course
a feature of negotiable conflict that the conflict may never be solved, as in the
demands of Quebec nationalists or Scottish or Catalan nationalists for secession,
where the constitutional order is the accepted framework for conflict resolution.
Negotiable conflict is likely to be easier to resolve in cases of conflicts within the
same social and cultural group, for instance with a political party or social move-
ment or in cases of civil disobedience. This is so because these kinds of conflicts
are less likely to be about fundamental issues of values and there is generally agree-
ment on who the adversary is as well as on the goals to be achieved and the means
that can be employed. In such cases there may also be a shared value system. It
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46 European Journal of Social Theory 4(1)

is also the case that negotiable conflicts are likely to be found in cases where there
is a high degree of interdependency among group ties, for instance industrial
disputes. As Lewis Coser (1956: 75), following Simmel and Durkheim, has
recognized, interdependency has been a major check on conflicts. Violence is
likely to be mostly latent and/or taking a symbolic form. In sum, when there are
shared norms regardless of differences in values, conventional disputes are solved
through negotiated means. What is decisive is the existence of a shared norma-
tive order.
Negotiated conflicts are being challenged today by two kinds of political
violence involving zero-sum conflicts over group differences, which we might
term modern and postmodern forms of political violence: in the first case,
modern political violence, there is a challenge to the sovereignty of the state and
its normative order by organized groups, generally nationalist movements; in the
second case, postmodern violence, the state itself mobilizes against a large section
of the society. In both cases the normative system of negotiated conflict resolu-
tion is in crisis as a result of value differences between groups being amplified by
organizational units that have succeeded in mobilizing large segments of the
population. In the first case political violence is contained by the state, which
remains committed to the international normative framework, and in the second
case the state itself has in effect disintegrated and is no longer tied to an inter-
national normative system. In the case of modern political violence there is always
the possibility that zero-sum conflict will eventually become negotiated conflict,
whereas in the second case this possibility is less likely without outside involve-
ment.
Modern political violence has generally been contained by the state and the
prospect of negotiated resolution has in general been realistic, in so far as there
is a functioning state or a civic order than can act as a final arbitrator. The
conflicts do not extend to a point at which the state and its legal order are unable
to main social order. An example of this kind of conflict is the case of Northern
Ireland. Here, unlike Quebec secessionism and other constitutional nationalisms,
the secessionist nationalism of the republican movement and the state patriotism
of the loyalist and unionist nationalism have frequently resorted to overt violence
– and only partially accept the constitututional process of conflict resolution –
and a refusal to accept a common normative framework. Since the beginning of
the peace process, the boundary between strategic action and normatively regu-
lated action has been a thin one. However, despite the absence of a shared norma-
tive order, the state has survived in Northern Ireland, distinguishing it from
Bosnia or Kosovo where the state collapsed or itself took up a partisan position.
Many conflicts today take this form, that is conflicts that do not take the form
of negotiable conflicts and where the conflict is about fundamental issues relat-
ing to group identity and membership. An extreme example might be political
terrorism. One strategy in these cases where the differences are very great is a
permanent condition of hostility, for instance in the partition of Korea or Cyprus.
For a long time the international system of the balance of power reflected this
attitude to deep divisions in ideology and more recently the Cold War maintained
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Gerard Delanty Cosmopolitanism and Violence 47

a potential conflict from becoming overt warfare. This is not surprising for, as
Anton Blok (1998) has argued, major social conflicts erupting in violence have
not been common in cases where the group differences are very great. Since
Freud, it has frequently been noted that where cultural differences between
groups are small and familiar due to the groups sharing a common social environ-
ment, there is likely to be stronger hostility than in cases where cultural differ-
ences are very great.
In many cases the separation of self and other is precisely what the debate is
about and many of the key features of negotiable conflict cannot be applied since
there are only zero-sum options – that is, there can be no winner. This frequently
is the case when the conflict concerns moral, religious and certain kinds of
cultural values, for instance euthanasia, abortion, vegetarianism. In the case of
these and others such as religious values and certain markers of ethnicity, the
possibility of a discursive outcome of disagreement is in principle impossible –
and often undesirable. Indeed, this is one of the main problems with Habermas’s
theory of communicative action (Delanty, 1997). In such instances, political and
moral leaders have preferred to maintain the conflict in order to maximize the
advantages that the narcissism of the small difference offers. In cases, then, where
the conflict over values is so great that there can be no shared normative system,
the spectre of violence is ever present in a symbolic form. Fortunately, not all
conflicts remain at the zero-sum level and can be converted into negotiable
conflicts or can be neutralized in a permanent state of hostility that does not reach
the level of violence. With regard to large-scale conflicts the state has generally
been the final arbitrator in such disputes. Constitutionalism, though ill-equipped
to deal with deeply rooted cultural conflicts for which it was never devised, is not
quite as impotent as is often thought (Tully, 1995).
But what happens when the state does not exist and when there is no norma-
tive order based on legal and civic institutions? This scenario has become all too
common today as more and more conflicts are occurring in the vacuum created
by the collapse of states. It is in this context that postmodern political violence
can be discussed (see Munck and de Silva, 2000; Bauman, 2001 in this issue). It
is a feature of the current situation that there are conflicts emerging which take
place in the absence of both a shared normative order and a functioning state.
The conflicts in Ruanda, Bosnia and Kosovo were examples of this situation,
which is one of civil war and genocide. There the state had collapsed along with
a discernible normative order. The extent of violence, made worse by the absence
of a state committed to maintaining social order, reached an extreme level as a
result of the total erosion of a normative order of any kind. This was, at least in
the context of western Europe and the wider western world, an unusual situation.
Even in cases of continued national unrest – Northern Ireland, Cyprus, the
Basque region, Corsica – the conflicts have always been contained by the state
and normal social relations have been relatively unaffected. There is much to
suggest that in the cases of Northern Ireland, East Timor in 1999, Korea in 2000,
for instance, that zero-sum conflicts are being translated into negotiated conflicts.
However, conflicts such as those in Bosnia and Kosovo were not only
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48 European Journal of Social Theory 4(1)

non-negotiable but any attempt to negotiate the terms of the conflict would have
exacerbated the extent of the violence. This kind of conflict may be termed post-
modern in the sense of the absence of a clear political goal, normative framework
or the assertion of a fundamental principle. Postmodern political violence is ulti-
mately conducted by the state against society, as opposed to a just war by one
state against another state in the name of an overriding principle of justice or a
challenge to the sovereignty of the state in the name of an opposing principle of
sovereignty by a subnational or politically organized group. Postmodern political
violence, then, is about wars led by the state against society and resemble civil
wars, except that the belligerents are now substantial proportions of the popu-
lation and the state is merely an instrument in the hands of recently mobilized
organizations.

Cosmopolitanism and the Public Sphere

Given that there is little chance of these kinds of conflicts, because of their inten-
sity, evolving into negotiated conflicts, the only possibility is for the international
order to intervene. This situation of the changing nature of political violence, then,
leads to the question of what the cosmopolitan point of view entails for us today.
There is the inescapable fact that the current reality of political violence under-
mines the assumptions of modernity, namely the possibility of negotiated conflict
resolution on the basis of a common normative system within the national order
of states and within the international order. The cosmopolitan perspective cannot
simply speak from the moral necessity of a legal framework, as Habermas has
argued, for it must be realized in a system of cosmopolitan law that is compelling
for all states, so that political action and military intervention will not be arbitrary,
for politics must rest on law, not merely on ethics (Habermas, 1999). This sense
of cosmopolitanism can be called a second-order globalization, in Karl-Otto Apel’s
term, which is expressed in the emergence of global civil society. In his view this
is an inescapable reality today and is a counterforce to the first-order globalization
of economic and technological forces (Apel, 2001). Apel has written extensively
of the need for a global ethic of responsibility, and, in essays going back to the
1970s, he was one of the first to highlight the question of a global political ethics
(Apel, 1978, 1987, 1993, 1996, 2000). The problematic of what he calls co-
responsibility has become a central issue in new debates on science and technology.
Global civil society can be seen as a real space that has appeared as a result of trends
in social, political and economic change. There is no doubt that networks of non-
state actors are becoming more and more important, allowing us to speak of global
civil society as a domain of radical governance as opposed to government, a
distinction which John Dryzek (1999) clarifies. In international relations litera-
ture, governance is a term used by those who favour spontaneous cooperation in
decentralized systems, and the term government is used by those who propose
world federalism or a global super-state. In contrast to the Kantian tradition of
internationalism, which was based on a world of free republican states, there is a
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Gerard Delanty Cosmopolitanism and Violence 49

pronounced anti-statist stance in these debates on political cosmopolitanism.

However, interpretations differ as to whether this is to be seen as enhancing the
possibility of cosmopolitan citizenship around a global constitution (legal cosmo-
politanism) or a global democracy (political cosmopolitanism).
I am proposing in this article that there is in fact also a third-order globaliz-
ation which is highlighted by postmodern political violence: it is found less in
global civil society than in the pluralization of values (Connolly, 1995). Cosmo-
politanism is not just the expression of transnational communication and govern-
ance, but also of the internal transformation of public spheres at national and
subnational levels. We should recall that the term cosmopolis is a combination
of two terms: the global order of the cosmos and the human order of the polis.
Cosmopolitanism is increasingly becoming a significant force in the world in
terms of culture, civic ties, law, technologies and transnational communities
(Delanty, 2000; Isin and Wood, 1999; Ong, 1999; Urry, 2000).
My argument is that visions of global civil society need to address the reality
of postmodern violence, which calls for a cosmopolitanism of a different kind
than is indicated by global civil society: it is a question of values as opposed to
the creation of a normative system. That is why the theory of the public sphere
is of particular importance in that it refers to a level of discourse that goes beyond
civil society and purely normative issues relating to law and politics, to address
the cultural constitution of values, for instance questions relating to the dynam-
ics of self and other as well as the wider cognitive context of defining the limits
of violence. The theory of the global civil society tends to ignore such issues, with
its concern for securing the conditions of cosmopolitan law and the possibility
of a global political ethics (Zolo, 1997). The main difference between my concep-
tion of cosmopolitanism and others’ (Held, 1995) is that I believe a cosmopolitan
civil society is meaningless in the absence of cosmopolitan public spheres in
which fundamental changes in values occur. The idea of cosmopolitanism I am
arguing for can be understood as a self-limiting kind of cosmopolitanism but
with a substantive component to it (Nussbaum, 1996). While I am of the view
that a cosmopolitan legal order is highly desirable, as is global governance by non-
state actors as well as states and transnational bodies, the real challenge for social
theory is the prior existence of a cosmopolitan public sphere, as the civic space
of public communication which should be seen as the condition of the possibility
of global civil society. Civil society comes into existence only when a public
sphere has already been created, for civil society cuts across the domain of the
state and the civic realm of the public sphere. Without a cosmopolitan public
sphere, legal and political forms of global civil society will not be rooted in the
civic dimension of community that is necessary in order to resist homogenizing
forms of globalization. The public sphere is a more basic form of community
than the political and legal domains of civil society. The public sphere is a domain
of communication and cultural contestation. A cosmopolitan public sphere is not
necessarily a global public sphere as such, though this can be one dimension to
it, but is located in national and subnational public spheres which have been
transformed by interaction with each other. In short, we need to distinguish
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50 European Journal of Social Theory 4(1)

between subnational, national and transnational public spheres with respect to

the degree of cosmopolitanism that they exhibit. Once these civic cosmopolitan
public spheres become evident, the distinct question of the legal and political
forms of a cosmopolitan civil society can be addressed.

Note

1 This is explored in my book Citizenship in a Global Age (Open University Press, 2000).
I would like to acknowledge comments on an earlier draft of this article by Piet
Strydom, Heidrun Friese and Peter Wagner.

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■ Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology, University of Liverpool, UK. He was

visiting professor at York University, Toronto in 1998 and at Doshisha University,
Kyoto in 2000. His books include Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality
(Macmillan, 1995); Social Science: Beyond Constructivism and Realism (Open
University Press, 1997); (with Patrick O’Mahony) Rethinking Irish History: National-
ism, Identity, Ideology (Macmillan, 1998); Social Theory in a Changing World (Polity
Press, 1999); Modernity and Postmodernity: Knowledge, Power, the Self (Sage,
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52 European Journal of Social Theory 4(1)

2000); Citizenship in a Global Age (Open University Press, 2000); and Challenging
Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society (Open University Press, 2001).
Address: Department of Sociology, University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone
Building, Bedford Street South, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZA, UK.
[email: delanty@liverpool.ac.uk]