When in 2000 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri published their book,Empire, it became an instant best-seller in anti-globalization circles around the world. The major thesis of the authors was that an empire-like regime with no territorial boundaries was presiding over ‘an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule – in short, a new form of sovereignty.’ The empire they saw ‘materializing before our eyes’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: ix) reverted to the more familiar imperial...

Following Castoriadis, I shall understand by ‘modernity’ the conjunction of two key significations: autonomy and control. Autonomy refers to the freedom of a society to make its own laws; control has to do with the expansion of rational mastery over the world of things, including the development of science and technology and their application to production and the control of nature (Castoriadis 1990: 15–17). Peter Wagner has developed this idea more precisely into an ‘interpretative approach’, which focuses on the responses that human beings give to certain basicproblématiquesof social life, responses that change with the onset of...

The colonial encounter has been a defining moment in the making of the contemporary world. It hasmadea particular world and established cognitive patterns forknowingthe world, yet the colonial encounter is missing in most sociological accounts of modernity. In recent times, increasing significance has been given to global phenomena. Acknowledging the complexity brought by globalization and interdependence has led theorists to contend that a new approach to modernity is needed. A shift from the singular trajectory of modernity to multiple modernities has been recommended (Arnason 2000; Delanty 2004; Eisenstadt 2000, 2001, 2004; Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998; Wittrock...

The operative paradigm of the current world order reflected in the UN Charter has proved a troubled one in the post-Cold War era. Differences over principles of sovereignty and military intervention have divided the world, especially the three critical strategic actors addressed in this essay: the United States, China and Europe. I characterize their competing notions of sovereignty as ‘new sovereigntism’, ‘old sovereigntism’ and ‘transnationalism’, respectively.¹ These three views, while clearly colliding with each other, are also in many respects mutually constitutive. In the shrinking world addressed in the Introduction and various chapters of this book, the challenge for international...

The historico-political developments following September 11 2001 have raised the profile of Islam and its political relevance. From a secular and liberal perspective, religious/transcendental struggles should be confined to the private domain and should concern individual consciences. However, the forceful entry of Islam as a topic into the public domain post-9/11 represents a questioning of the secular/liberal world. This raises broader questions about the links between religion and politics and the relevance of religious interpretations for our life in common and in the commons, that is, in the public domain. At stake here are the common elements and bonds necessary...

‘To take part in demonstrations and hooliganismin the name of politics’ [my emphasis], said Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, speaking to a group of college students in the city of Patna in Bihar on August 30 1955, ‘is, apart from the right or wrong of it, not proper for students of any country’ (Nehru 2001b [1955]: 83). A ‘minor’ conflict between the students of the B. N. College, Patna, and the State Transport Employees had led to police firing on the students on August 12 and 13 1955. The Independence Day celebrations on August 15 were...

In order to consider fully the challenges and possibilities of world-making, it is necessary to understand the socioeconomic space that already exists across national boundaries and how it has been politically constituted and reconstituted over time. Nelson Goodman’s observation, already cited by the editors in the Introduction to this volume, makes the point precisely: ‘Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already at hand; the making is a re-making’ (1978: 6).

Discussions of the global era and how to navigate or shape it often fail to give sufficient consideration to the global socioeconomic order that pre-existed, and continuously...

This chapter looks at world-making from the viewpoint of one of its constitutive ingredients: solidarity. Solidarity is the substance of a successful world-making, if world-making is defined as the creation of a common universe. It makes sense to think that in order for this common universe to exist, there must be something that holds it together. Here, I will argue that solidarity should not be conceptualized as the ‘something that holds the common universe together’ but rather as the ‘there must be something that holds the common universe together’. The distinction here lies in a step I think worth taking,...

The point of departure for this chapter is that Islam is an active agent in the alteration of European space, necessitating a new frame for thinking about the relationship between the political and the religious bond, and the ways in which this relationship reinforces or transforms the meaning of a polity such as the French Republic or a religious community such as European Islam. Rethinking the relations between Islam and Europe requires a new conceptual space, a new frame that introduces an intercultural perspective to our readings of European modernity. It requires a sensitivity to the duality of certain key...

Globalization is changing the way we argue about justice. Not so long ago, in the heyday of social democracy, disputes about justice presumed what I shall call a ‘Keynesian–Westphalian frame’. Typically played out within modern territorial states, arguments about justice were assumed to concern relations among fellow citizens, to be subject to debate within national publics, and to contemplate redress by national states. This was true for each of two major families of justice claims: claims for socioeconomic redistribution and claims for legal or cultural recognition. At a time when the Bretton Woods system of international capital controls facilitated...

The question of the emergence of a common world out of a diverse set of founding assumptions – and the question of what sort of world it can be – are crucial in the context of pronounced regional varieties of world-making conceptions. Assuming that world-making possibly means that a society must be framed, then this frame entails rules – i.e., rules can be the frame. This call for rules answers Nancy Fraser’s call (in Chapter 10) for a frame. But the frame she suggests should be of a special kind. She argues that framing refers to transformative politics and thus...

Implicit in the idea of world-making are the assumptions that human beings are the makers of their own history and that in the incessant shaping of their socio-historical worlds they experience some sort of commonality. This dual presupposition entails the attribution of at least some sort of control to both individuals and emerging collectivities over the status and direction of socio-historical institutions and life-trajectories. The allegedly ‘common’ world, emerging and/or persisting in time, poses a number of theoretical problems, of which this chapter attempts to examine only those relating to its creation and constitution. However, a preliminary task that I...

At the time of writing, it seems that the sceptics have been right. After the referenda on the constitutional treaty of the European Union in France and the Netherlands, the European political project is in disarray. Some of those sceptics will even insist that there never was such a political project anyway. The European Union, in their view, is nothing but an association of states to further their own interests, and the apparent acceleration of political integration over the past fifteen years did not really change its nature. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, so they will underline, explicitly does...

That nations dwell in eternal anarchy has been one of the defining assumptions that have shaped the socialization of several generations of students of international relations. While political struggle inside the state takes place in the shadow of the law (conceived as the sovereign’s command), this mediation was thought to be absent in the international arena. However, the demise of the Soviet Union and the increase in the volume, scope and speed of transnational interactions challenged this traditional assumption of anarchy and non-co-operation. Departing from the presumption that war was now a less plausible defining characteristic of the international arena,...