In Search of a Shared Planetary Order

以天下观天下

Roger T. Ames 安乐哲

Peking University

Internationalizing John Dewey’s Concept of the “Great Community”

Westphalian sovereignty is the principle of international law that emerged out of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) ending the Thirty-Years War. According to this formulation of international relations that today still undergirds our modern state system, each nation state regardless of size has an equal right to sovereignty over its own territory. In many respects, this concept of national sovereignty can be read as the values of autonomy and simple equality simply scaled up from the individual to the level of the sovereign nation state. And just as with concept of the discrete individual, this notion of the individual sovereign state is again a fiction. In Dewey’s essay, “[John] Austin’s Theory of Sovereignty,” he argues that Austin fails to recognize the formal institutions of state sovereignty are in fact themselves only secondary constructions of the more primary and thus sovereign social forces that give them expression:

In every existing civilized state governmental power is in the hands of a certain body of persons, capable of more or less accurate assignment and thus Austin’s conception seems to agree fairly with facts. But . . . take away the forces which are behind governments—which have made them what they are, and the existence and character of these governments is an accident, likely to be changed at any moment. Admit these forces, and, since they determine the government, they are sovereign.^[1]

Dewey anticipates Whitehead’s fallacies of “simple location” and “misplaced concreteness” but in political guise—that is, the attribution of exclusive sovereignty to the formal institution of the state itself while ignoring the underlying processual transitivity of the vital social forces to which governments owe their very existence.^[2] For Dewey, this doctrine of the sovereign nation state, far from serving the values of equity and diversity among states, produces a kind of international, “everyone for themselves” anarchy that allows for a “denial on the part of a political state of either legal or moral responsibility.” He avers that

. . . it is a direct proclamation of the unlimited and unquestionable right of a political state to do what it wants to do in respect to other nations and to do it as and when it pleases. It is a doctrine of international anarchy; and as a rule those who are most energetic in condemning anarchy as a domestic and internal principle are foremost in asserting anarchic irresponsibility in relations between nations.^[3]

It is not lost on Dewey that the reality of European international relations in the more than three and a half centuries since the rights of equal and sovereign states were ushered in by the Peace of Westphalia has amounted to little more than perpetual war,

. . . for right is here only a polite way of saying power. It was usual during the World War to accuse Germany of acting upon the notion that Might makes Right. But every state that cultivates and acts upon the notion of National Sovereignty is guilty of the same crime.^[4]

Dewey himself as a self-declared internationalist in scaling up his “idea” of democracy and the Great Community, to the “idea” of internationalism at a global level wants nothing less than to transform international relations and the world’s geopolitical order. Dewey begins from the wholeness of experience as the grounding cosmological assumption of his pragmatism in extending this idea of democracy from the social to the political, and from the nation state to his internationalism. For Dewey, the formal nation state is just one more political form. It is not itself a final end, and indeed must always be understood as subordinate to the quality of the more primary social forces that sustain and continue to shape it. Dewey asks if the state

. . . is not just an instrumentality for promoting and protecting other and more voluntary forms of association, rather than a supreme end in itself. . . . The state remains highly important—but its importance consists more and more in its power to foster and coordinate the activities of voluntary groupings. Only nominally is it in any modern community the end for the sake of which all the other societies and organizations exist. Groupings for promoting the diversity of goods that men share have become the real social units. They occupy the place which traditional theory has claimed either for mere isolated individuals or for the supreme and single political organization.^[5]

For Dewey, to think in terms of the sovereign state like the “new pecuniary individualism” he reviles, is yet another example of our inveterate pattern of substance thinking that must be overcome. It is a clear illustration of a failure to distinguish between a noun and a gerund, a thing and an event, a leg and the activity of walking, a body and the eventfulness of embodied living. Simply put, we need to include both form and function as two aspects of any human activity. In his essay, “The Emancipation of the International Spirit,” Dewey insists that it is the geopolitical interdependence characteristic of internationalism that is the fact, and that the sovereign nation state is only a second order abstraction from what are fundamentally organic, intra-national (rather than inter-national) relations:^[6]

While economic forces have brought about the present world internationalism, the results extend far beyond industry and commerce. They extend beyond the political area, whether diplomatic or military. It is a commonplace that the discoveries of science and the fruitions of art now quickly become the possession of the whole world, and that the nations are sharers in a noble emulation. . . . It is matter of utilizing for good the economic interdependence of the peoples who inhabit the earth, and of making it possible for an international mind to function effectively in the control of the world’s practical affairs.^[7]

Our penchant for giving primacy to national sovereignty is anathema to, and is belied by the growth in “trans-national interests” that follow from thinking “internationally.” Clearly, opines Dewey

. . . the weal and woe of any modern state is bound up with that of others. Weakness, disorder, false principles on the part of any state are not confined within its boundaries. They spread and infect other states. The same is true of economic, artistic and scientific advances. Moreover the voluntary associations just spoken of do not coincide with political boundaries. Associations of mathematicians, chemists, astronomers; business corporations, labor organizations, churches are trans-national because the interests they represent are worldwide.^[8]

Reflecting on the unwarranted prominence given the nation state, Dewey rues the fact that “it is the vogue of this doctrine, or dogma, that presents the strongest barrier to the effective formation of an international mind.” His conclusion, then, is that “internationalism is not an aspiration but a fact, not a sentimental ideal but a force.” And when achieved, internationalism gives the lie to “the traditional dogma of exclusive national sovereignty.”^[9]

      It is the enriching possibilities made available to local communal life by appreciating the fact political boundaries conjoin as well as divide us that inspired Dewey’s internationalism and made him a citizen of the world.^[10] In his reflections on local communal life, Dewey insists that

. . . while local, it will not be isolated. Its larger relationships will provide aninexhaustible and flowing fund of meanings upon which to draw with assurance that its drafts will be honored. Territorial states and political boundaries will persist; but they will not be barriers which impoverish experience by cutting man off from his fellows; they will not be hard and fast divisions whereby external separation is converted into inner jealousy, fear, suspicion and hostility.^[11]

Dewey announces explicitly, that “we must make the accident of our internal composition into an idea, an idea upon which we may conduct our foreign as well as our domestic policy.”^[12] For Dewey it is clear that, if we aspire to a true internationalism, we need to articulate an “idea” of internationalism at a more fundamental level than the fragmenting of what is a continuous humanity into discrete, formal, and abstract nation states. A truly robust notion of internationalism will require us to give primacy to those interdependent organic forces that operate at a much deeper and pervasive level than the epiphenomenon of the nation state. Otherwise, worries Dewey, we must accept the inevitable fact that “an international judicial tribunal will break in the end upon the principle of national sovereignty,” and that all of our best efforts at internationalism will fail as a consequence.^[13]

[for full text, please see the Collected Works on Country and Area Studies, 2022]