art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

There is nothing more risky than making a prediction about the future. Whoever focuses,
however, on the increasing power of the global economy can derive – experimentally
– a short-term and a long-term prognosis. In the short-term, protectionist forces may
triumph, a heterogeneous mix of nationalists, anticapitalists, environmentalists,
defenders of national democracy as well as xenophobic groupings and religious
fundamentalists. In the long term, however, an even more paradoxical coalition
between the supposed “losers” from globalization (trade unions, environmentalists,
democrats) and the “winners” (big business, financial markets, world trade organizations,
the World Bank) may indeed lead to a renewal of the political – provided that both
sides recognize that their specific interests are best served by cosmopolitan rules.
Then, advocates of workers’ rights, environmentalists, and defenders of democracy
will support cosmopolitan legal systems. But so will globally active businesses for,
at the end of the day, they can only be successful in a framework that guarantees
themselves and others legal, political, and social security.
Ignoring the fact that the globalization of the market is turning the world into a
battlefield for the survival of the fittest is not only unacceptable to the forces that
oppose the neoliberal agenda; it is also dangerous for capital itself. This raises the
question of whether there is a chance that both groups – the opponents of neoliberalism
and the cosmopolitan faction of capital – will find the cosmopolitan state a useful
instrument in a second Great Transformation (like that of Karl Polanyi), where the
complex processes of globalization undermine the capacity of nation-states to act
effectively. Perhaps the cosmopolitan state could become the leading political answer
to the paradox that in the era of globalization and pluralism we find ourselves caught
in the maelstrom of conflicts over political identities and ethnic fragmentation.
In order to determine the possibilities of such a cosmopolitical regime, three
questions have to be answered systematically: Who are the losers – that is, the
probable enemies – of the pluralization of borders inside national societies and
between societies and states in the international system? How do cosmopolitical
coalitions nationally and internationally – for example, between global civil society
(NGOs) and transnational corporations, transnational corporations and post-national
states, post-national states and global civil society actors – become possible and
powerful? And how can correspondingly powerful anti-cosmopolitical coalitions
be overcome? Finally, what has to be recognized of the dark side, the unexpected
consequences of the victory of the cosmopolitical transformation (for example, the
“military humanism” of the Kosovo war in 1999)?
Still, the only way to make this cosmopolitical vision possible, as Immanuel Kant
taught almost two hundred years ago, is to act steadily “as if” it were possible. Let me
close with an ironic quote from George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts
himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to
himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
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