With Yannis Stivachtis (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University) and Scott Nelson (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University), The Society of the Study of Difference participated at the conference organized by the Athens Institute for Education and Research on 1-3 June 2006 on the theme Humanity, Globality and Difference.

Human Rights, Global Social Justice and Cultural Diversity: Humanism and the Question of Difference

The demands for an effective human rights regime and for global social justice jointly and separately constitute a challenge to the norms of the Westphalian system. The latter are based at root on sovereignty and a distinction between the domestic and international, and cannot be sustained if human rights and global socio-economic arrangements are to be judged in the light of international standards. Westphalian norms have been defended by statist authors who place a great deal of emphasis on a general right of political communities to determine their own fate. But the drive to establish universal standards, represented by notions of human rights and global social justice, has also come under attack from those who argue that the universal standards in question are, in fact, those of the West. The international human rights regime establishes, it is argued, a template for political legitimacy in the modern world that privileges a particular, Western, conception of politics and order.

The preservation of difference and diversity has been regarded as an important, if not an essential goal for western societies and political systems. Democratic liberal regimes are therefore viewed as the safeguards of pluralism. But does the universalization of Western values lead to the preservation of difference and diversity at the global scale or to the opposite direction? As many other political concepts, humanism can also serve as a political tool for political purposes. Does this mean that in the era of increasing globalization ‘humanism’ is to serve as a tool for the imposition of a particular, Western type of global order?  If difference and diversity are to be preserved, is the universalization of humanism what we really want? How can we preserve heterogeneity in the global system if we try to homogeneize the world?

On the other hand, are the values in question, as it has been argued, in fact, only Western? As we speak of Western values, can we also speak of Asian, African or other regional values? What are these values and how do they differ from the Western ones? In which international or even domestic practices are these values reflected? Can we speak of regional values or should we emphasize local values? But again, is/are there any real difference(s) among regional/local value systems or there is only a claim to difference? And if we accept a claim to difference without any consideration, do we then open the door for accepting and legitimizing any claim to difference? Searching for homogenization we may sacrifice difference and diversity but in our efforts to preserve difference and diversity at any cost don’t we justify the existence of political regimes claiming to be different although their scope is to eventually eliminate difference and diversity altogether? Do we arrive to the same end no matter which road we get? Or there is a middle way, and if yes then, what is it? This paper purports to address these questions.

Another Cosmopolitanism:  Universalizing the Difference\Differing the Universal

This paper explores the concept of cosmopolitanism as it emerged in Kant’s political writings as well as in other Enlightenment political theory, and examines what is termed the “ethos of cosmopolitanism” in the early twenty-first century in light of the secularizing philosophy of the Enlightenment two hundred years on. 

Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and William Connolly the paper argues that the Kantian concept of cosmopolitanism implies a distinct notion of secularization that involves a highly abstract and yet technical idea of the transparency of universal language.  Such a conception of cosmopolitan democracy, human rights, and freedom yields a politics that desires the erasure of difference in a crucial sense:  it degrades if not destroys the idiomatic in human experience – language, custom, tradition, nation, culture, and so forth.  I ask if the absolute singularity of the idiom can be respected and preserved as nations drift toward the Western, liberal values of democracy and human rights. 

These universal “goods” remain part of the liberal dream, but they need not trump the expression and preservation of any number of idiomatic differences.  What aspects of universalism should be preserved in the Enlightenment’s philosophical legacy, and how ought this be done politically?  I offer a glimpse of this problematic in the context of present-day discourses of economic development, foreign aid, and debt relief for LDCs.