Transnational Justice and Democracy Overcoming Three Dogmas of Political Theory

The title of my contribution seems to signal a tension, indeed virtually a contradiction, in a number of respects. Democracy is generally understood as a form of political organization and government in which, through general and public participatory procedures, a sufficiently legitimate political will is formed that acquires the force of law. Justice, by contrast, appears (at least in the eyes of many theorists of democracy) to be a value external to this context that is understood not so much as connected with procedures of “input” or “throughput” legitimation but instead as a concept oriented to “outputs” or outcomes. However, as I see it, we inevitably talk past the topic of “transnational justice and democracy” unless we avoid such false dichotomies. My thesis will be that justice must be contextualized or “grounded” in a political manner as regards both how we understand it and its application to relations beyond the state. In arguing thus, I take issue with some erroneous dogmas in political theory: 1. The dogma of the incompatibility of democracy and justice; 2. the dogma that only a state can constitute a context of justice; and 3. the dogma that democracy must take the form of a practice of a demos organized within a state. This third dogma also implies that the project “transnational justice and democracy” involves a contradiction, in the sense that justice (contrary to dogma 2) is understood as being independent of nations and states, whereas democracy is defined in statist terms. In order to achieve a clear view of the prospects of transnational justice and democracy and to be able to understand transnational forms of democracy as simultaneously a requirement and a condition of justice, all of these dogmas must be overcome.