Global Justice and Politics: On the transition from the normative to the political level

FRANCISCO NAISHTAT

Calcuta

Conferencia; Second Critical Studies Conference; 2007

University of Kolkatta, Critical Research Group (CRG)

ABSTRACT. I intend to deal here with the well known question of global justice, which is justice not just referred to the state nor the nation or the local community but to the whole world. It may seem excessively pretentious to frame justice in such a huge horizon when at the mean time the very question of justice within the states or in the more local levels is far from being solved. Besides we have become in human sciences so used in the last twenty years to speak on a fragmentary and micro-level perspective, especially after the end of what Lyotard called metanarratives like Worldhistory (Weltgeschichte), progress or philosophy of history, that we are reluctant to frame our subject in the macro scale. This is also truth of the very language of politicians, who ignore more and more, since at least the last two decades, the questions concerning the justice or injustice of the dominant world order, and completely privilege a pragmatic language of the wealthy economy of the local community, the nation or the region, but not the world, nor of course humanity (which is now replaced by the word “humanitarian”, with a completely different meaning and scope). Besides there is a very accepted and common sense trend to think that the political comes after the normative clarity and deals just with the contingent question of the methods in order to adjust the world to the normative concepts. In this paper however the political dimension of justice comes before the specifically normative determination of the contents of justice. I think indeed that the political dimension of the global belongs to the ontological level of global justice. Dealing with the political dimension of the global is to deal with the question of the global subject of justice. So the question of global power, in an arendtien or even foucaldian sense as a capacity to change and not just domination or gouvernance is very relevant to the normative redistributionist content of justice at a global scale. To talk about global justice is to ask for a comprehension of the thing in terms of a political possibility for human and this belongs to the ontological dimension of global justice. As such a thing justice is always political before being economical or moral, because it is linked with power in a political way. In this paper we then consider this global politicity of justice in the frame of discussions being held on globalization.