Rethinking Post-colonial
Theory in a Global Context: John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples
Malcolm Hayward
From its beginnings, Edward Said's Orientalism
(1978) has produced conflict in post-colonial studies. Does Professor Said’s theory suggest global
implications and/or strategies as Culture and Imperialism (1993)
argues? Or does the East of Orientalism
belong only to the Middle East and particularly to Middle Eastern studies? Is there a monolithic "Othering"
at work? Or do resistive pockets exist
within Western imperial discourse?
Perhaps the thorniest issue, however, concerns the stance from which to
view global issues of imperialism and colonization. Ethical decisions—judgments, in a word—should play a large part
in post-colonial theorizing and critiques.
But on what basis can judgments be made? Where should accountability lie?
And if there is accountability, how can it be enforced?
Moreover, there has been a recent
shift in the major players in the 21st century version of the Great
Game. Said and Bhabha have, in
characteristically fine ways, questioned the stability of the term
“nation.” “National identity” may now
be seen more as a “notional identity.”
But does it matter any more?
Does national identity even count?
These questions come on the heels of global political reactions to
global capitalist institutions (multinational corporations) and the global
political institutions wholly owned and operated by them. By global capitalist institutions, I mean
organizations like Bertelsmann, Aramco, Merck, Sony, Microsoft, Daimler-Benz,
and so on. By global political
institutions, I refer to the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, and the various
protectors of Intellectual Property.
Imperialism and colonization must now be looked at in terms of these
global institutions, rather than in political or even cultural terms. The dichotomies first world/third world,
east/west, north/south, developed/underdeveloped do not hold the relevance they
once had.
There are thus two issues to be
faced: first, how to establish a foundational basis for ethical judgments, and
second, how to theorize resistance to the new economic imperialism which has
changed rather radically from the old imperialism of nation-state or region and
which has rendered Samuel Huntington’s “clashes of culture” obsolete. Critics of both of these situations must ask
where to look for guiding principles upon which to base judgments within a
global context. I want to avoid both
the hegemonic “westernization” of democratic/capitalist values and the
seemingly benign cultural relativism that avoids any standards of ethical or
political judgment. I also wish to
avoid ethics based upon particular religions.
As valuable as a set of environmental principles are in imagining the
future (or lack of it) of our world, I think there are limitations in the
extent to which environmentalism or ecology can be used as a basis for
analyzing human systems (such as politics and cultures) in more than a
metaphorical way. I also wish to look
elsewhere than feminism, again for the limitations it might impose in analyzing
structures that are only partly shaped by gender relationships. John Rawls' 1999 essay The Law of Peoples
seems a good place to look for such a stance.
I will try to show that Rawls works pretty well in the first instance,
creating a foundational basis for ethics, and offers a procedural approach for
the second issue of economic imperialism.
Let me first briefly introduce the work of Rawls, a
political philosopher from Harvard, for his work, despite its wide-ranging
influence in other fields, from ethics to political science to business, has
been rather surprisingly ignored by our discipline; the MLA Bibliography lists
but ten references to Rawls in the past 20 years, with Altieri and Seyla
Benhabib being the most notable contributors.
In comparison, the database for Academic Search, reviewing selected
journals in philosophy, politics, and history, lists 167 references. By the 1960s, political philosophy in
America lacked a way to talk about progressive liberal ideals in anything but
an historical context. In 1971, Rawls' Theory
of Justice sought to determine general principles by which to measure the
nature of justice and the proper goals, as determined by reason, that a liberal
society might have to maximize benefits to individuals. Rawls does not overlook his basis in Kant,
but in many ways his work goes beyond Kant to create a "meta-ethics"
of behavioral principles.
Rawls bases his theory upon two
simply stated but compelling principles:
First Principle
Each person is to have an equal right to the most
extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar
system of liberty for all.
Second Principle
Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged
so that they are both:
(a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged,
consistent with the just savings principle, and
(b) attached to offices and positions open to all
under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. (302)
These
principles follow from Rawls’ General Conception of justice:
All social primary goods—liberty and opportunity,
income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally
unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage
of the least favored. (303)
Enactment
of such principles is facilitated by a kind of thought-experiment, proposed by
Rawls, which makes use of the Veil of Ignorance. It works this way. Let’s
say two parties are disputing the future arrangement of a set of primary
goods—income, for example. In what
Rawls terms the “originary position,” both parties know the benefits and
disadvantages that will flow from a particular distribution of those goods:
that a worker will achieve a particular wage, a manager a certain salary, a
stakeholder a certain return on investment, and so on. But a veil of ignorance exists for the
parties. Neither party in the original
position knows their specific place in that future arrangement. Reason should prevail to bring the parties
to agree to an arrangement that maximizes the benefits to all. If we accept Rawls’ tenets as foundational
or universal, they offer us a valid and systematic method both for judging just
or unjust actions in a society.
Yet there is in our discipline, as
in others, an active distrust of reason as a Western construct and of the
universal as merely a tool to extend colonial or patriarchal policies. An awareness of this distrust can be seen in
the work of Seyla Benhabib and Jurgen Habermas. Benhabib, in writing of Rawls and feminism, states, “the problem
is that the Kantian presuppositions also guiding the Rawlsian theory are so
weighty that the equivalence of all selves qua rational agents dominates and
stifles any serious acknowledgment of difference, alterity, and of the standpoint
of the ‘concrete other’” (167). The
point is that for Benhabib, the self is always a situated self, and that it
makes no sense in pretending to abstract it.
A similar line is taken by Habermas, for whom the issue is discourse,
rather than situatedness. Habermas
feels that it is “unnecessary to resort to Rawls’s fictitious original position
with its ‘veil of ignorance’” (198) because the free play of “practical
discourse” will better fulfill the function of creating a model of, what
Benhabib terms, a “free public reason” or resolve the contradictions of
multiple perspectives in, again her terms, “the foray of public contestation”
(12).
Rawls counters, however, that the
discourse model of Habermas and Benhabib’s call for a “free public reason” in
order to include the needs of the feminist movement are includable within the
guidelines of political liberalism as derived from the model proposed in A
Theory of Justice (LP 142 n.). This
is, I believe, part of the agenda of Rawls’s 1999 publication, The Law of
Peoples, which includes the rather long essay “The Idea of Public Reason
Revisited,” and I will return to the issue of discourse ethics and free public
reason shortly. First, however, I need
to introduce The Law of Peoples.
In this book, Rawls extends his theory of distributive justice to a
global context. For post-colonial
critics seeking to operate from a global context, the approach is useful not
only for the principles put forth but for the general procedural means to
conceive of, if not to achieve, a "reasonable pluralism" (11) among
peoples.
Rawls begins by a series of moves based upon
rational principles, developing the ideas of justice and public reason to argue
that a reasonable Law of Peoples based upon the tenets of political liberalism
is both possible and realistic. A
“realistic utopia” is how Rawls phrases it.
Several features mark this argument.
First, Rawls conceives of governments as an outgrowth of the need of
citizens to act, to express their common sympathies and moral nature (23). Governments are thus a means, not an end;
the basic unit to be considered, then, is the people—and thus the Law of
Peoples, not the Laws of States.
Second, while Rawls openly admits that democracy seems to be the most
practicable means of government for achieving the ends of justice, it is not
the only means of governance that might work.
Hierarchical societies may also achieve the ends of justice. Rawls' work is particularly apposite at this
juncture--as an answer to some of the problems raised by Orientalism--since
he specifically addresses ways in which Muslim states may operate through a
"decent consultation hierarchy" (4) to achieve similar ends to those
of the liberal democratic state. The
approach helps us move beyond the icily reified conflict recorded in Samuel
Huntington's too aptly phrased "clashes of culture."
At the least, the fundamental division is not
between democratic and non-democratic peoples or liberal and non-liberal, but
decent and non-decent or outlaw peoples.
Decent peoples allow toleration and subscribe to eight principles:
1.
Peoples
are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be
respected by other peoples.
2.
Peoples
are to observe treaties and undertakings.
3.
Peoples
are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them.
4.
Peoples
are to observe a duty of non-intervention.
5.
Peoples
have the right of self-defense but no right to instigate war for reasons other
than self-defense.
6.
Peoples
are to honor human rights.
7.
Peoples
are to observe certain specified restrictions in the conduct of war.
8.
Peoples
have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that
prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime. (37)
But
how about the objections of Benhabib and Habermas and for that matter any
others who have a distrust of reason and seemingly a priori, universalist
assumptions about the nature of politics?
Several answers are possible. First, I might coyly suggest that the form
in which Rawls’s discourse is framed—a scholarly book meant to be entered as an
item into a public contestation of principles—fulfills in itself a discursive
role. That’s self-evident. Secondly, The Law of Peoples, much
more than A Theory of Justice, seems much more grounded in the shape of
historical and contemporary events.
References are made to the Civil War, World War II, the IMF, and so
on. Rawls goes to great lengths in a
philosophical enterprise to tie his work to areas of public contestation. In particular, his thorough analysis of
Muslim states is pertinent to issues of Orientalism. In short, Rawls’s book is both a work of discourse and of
situatedness.
A deeper problem, it seems to me, is posed by the
changing nature of imperialism.
Political structures have one essential element for an ethical
philosopher: they are open to public discourse. In liberal societies, such as the U.S., the contentious fray of
public debate is waged in newspapers and TV, in political campaigns, in the
courts, and so on. Even non-liberal
societies have recourse to subversive methods of discourse. But where does public debate occur regarding
global capitalism occur? In stockholder
meetings? Hardly. Sometimes it happens in the streets, as in
Seattle, Kyoto, and here in Washington, D.C., and sometimes in the courts, as
in the recent ruling that G.E. clean up the Hudson, and sometimes in the
movies, as in Erin Brockovich, but by and large, as long as the actions
of multinational corporations violate no laws, they go unnoticed—except of
course for those directly influenced by them, as when a plant shuts down.
Here, then, is where Rawls comes into play. The limitation of situatedness is that it
does not easily allow for discussion of ethical requirements for institutions
rather than for individuals. The limitation
of discourse ethics is that it only works well if there is a mode to force
public discourse and in the economic world that does not operate. Only in exceptional circumstances are
corporations held accountable to legal principles of justice—the tobacco
companies and Firestone/Bridgestone—are such exceptions. Far more rarely are they held accountable to
such basic principles as “the greatest benefit for the least advantaged,” from A
Theory of Justice, or a “duty to assist other peoples living under unfavorable
conditions,” from The Law of Peoples.
Procedurely Rawls might be of use in dealing with
this problem. It might seem that in a
discourse theory of justice or in a theory such as Rawls’s that the word is
paramount, particularly the written word.
Benhabib argues, for example, that for Rawls justice must follow
publicly recognized rules. “In Rawls
view,” she writes, “free public reason is the manner in which public associations
account for their doings and conduct their affairs in a polity” (102). Such accountability to the rules of reason
might create a sense that such legislation comes first, but for Rawls, I don’t
think that it does. The beginning and
the end of Rawls’s theory are in the performances of social actions. The “realistic utopia” is based upon
actions, “following just (or at least decent) social policies and establishing
just (or at least decent) social institutions” (126). And the beginning point too is for Rawls the basic structure of
society and the various conditions for social engagement with which we are
faced; as he says, “we depend on the facts of social conduct as historical
knowledge and reflection establish them” (16) in order to construct a theory of
justice. Legislation, then, follows
social performance, as the implicit features of the social contract are first
acted out, then articulated, then institutionalized and inscribed.
At this point we need better articulations of the
social contract as it is performed or abused and as it may be envisioned within
the framework of the capitalist system.
Rawls poses as a danger to democratic governments and thus to liberal
politics the “large concentrations of private economic and corporate power
veiled from public knowledge and almost entirely free from accountability”
(24). The next stage in the struggle to
enact a decent and just society will be to turn our attention to these
concentrations and, within a system of justice, work to hold them accountable.
Works
Cited
Benhabib,
Seyla. Situating the Self: Gender,
Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Habermas,
Jurgen. Moral Consciousness and
Communicative Action. Trans.
Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990.
Hayward,
Malcolm. "Edward Said and the
Problem of Political Action," The
State of the Arts of Middle East Studies.
Tunis: CEROMDI, 1994.
75-83.
---. "Globalization and the Clashes of
Culture." International Relations
and the Middle East on the Threshold of the 21st Century (University of
Florida Presses, in press).
---. "Globalized Mergers and Acquisitions:
The Dangers of a Monoculture." Competitiveness Review, 9(2): 1999, 1-4.
---. "Justice, Equity, and
Competition." Competitiveness Review. 4 (2): 1994, 1-2.
Huntington,
Samuel P. "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs.
72.3 (1993): 22-49.
---. The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order. New York:
Touchstone, 1998.
---. "If Not
Civilizations, What? Paradigms of the
Post-Cold War World." Foreign
Affairs. 72.5 (1993): 186-194.
---. "The West: Unique,
Not Universal." Foreign Affairs. 75.6 (1996): 28-46.
Rawls,
John. The Law of Peoples.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
---. A
Theory of Justice. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1971.
Said,
Edward. Culture and Imperialism.
New York: Knopf, 1993.
---. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.