Thinking the Western Democratic Crisis Transnationally

• In Event: Comparative and Global Political Thought

Abstract

My paper considers injustice in the West as a transnational phenomenon that needs to be addressed alongside—rather than in lieu of—injustice in the developing world. I engage with the dynamic literature on global justice, which has so far focused on the normative responsibilities of the “wealthy West” toward the “poor Global South.” As we witness the serious social and economic dislocation of groups of racialized citizens and downwardly mobile white working class in the US, we lack a normative framework to consider their situation as a consequence of transnational forces. My project proposes to theorize transnationalism as a normative retort to resurgent populism in the West, which misleadingly proposes a nationalist retreat as the best response to globalization. Disruptive global forces test the resilience of Western democracies but we lack conceptual tools to understand how emerging forms of vulnerability are embedded in transnational processes. My paper contests the usefulness of the “global” as a concept, particularly the way in which it has been conceptualized in the global justice literature in political theory, i.e., the West and the non-West as internally homogeneous and contrasting realms. Based on this characterization scholars ask what the West owes to the Global South. Answers vary but across the spectrum, the binary opposition that grounds the debate is hardly ever contested. As a consequence, when, on the one hand, liberal nationalists consider the problem of redistribution, they do not conceptualize domestic problems as potentially emerging as a consequence of global forces; as transnationalism does. Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, claim the need to give equal weight to the disadvantaged abroad, but also do not consider potential linkages between grievances in the West and the non-West. I enlist Frantz Fanon’s work on the national bourgeoisie and national consciousness and W. E. B. Du Bois writings on “poor whites” in order to problematize this binary. Through Fanon, I contrast destructive forms of nationalism with a democratically formed national consciousness to understand Western anti-globalization populism and the stakes of the Western national bourgeoisies in these projects. Du Bois complements this account by showing how race partitions national loyalties and allows for systems of domination abroad and domestically that are racialized in continuous ways. I argue that these political dynamics need to be conceptualized in order to understand how global economic forces globally result in particular domestic arrangements and how domestic arrangements, in turn, structure the global. This allows us to theorize the question of transnational justice, trace responsibility, and consider the transnational politics that are needed to counter injustice. Without such a transnational framework we cannot consider contemporary challenges to globalization in ways that do not devolve into autarchy and nationalism.

Author

• Ines Valdez, Ohio State University