Theoria

The contributions to this edition of Theoria, while either charting new areas of intellectual and scholarly reflection or bringing new light to bear on established questions, are continuous with and further extend themes that have, over the past decade, shaped the journal as a coherent editorial project. Thus, the questions of democracy, justice, political identity and the nature of the modern state, as well as that of the contemporary global economy, run through the pages of this issue as so many Ariadne’s threads, connecting it with previous issues. Bruce Mazlish, in his article Psychohistory and the Question of Global Identity in Theoria 93 posed the question of whether a new global sense of identity and belonging was beginning to emerge. This edition of Theoria offers a collection of essays that, in one way or another, explore that question further.

The prospect of a global economic recession, in the wake of the financial crises in the world’s emerging economies, has injected a sense of renewed urgency into longstanding discussions about the reform of global economic governance. But the calls for greater transparency and openness in the deliberations of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are largely symptomatic of a deeper legitimation crisis which afflicts all the key institutions of global governance, including the United Nations itself. For there is a growing perception that existing mechanisms of global governance are both ineffectual in relation to the tasks they have acquired, especially so in managing the consequences of globalisation, whilst also being unaccountable sites of power.

Political communities are in the process of being transformed. Of course, transformation can take many forms. But one type of transformation is of particular concern in this paper: the progressive enmeshment of human communities with each other. Over the last few centuries, human communities have come into increasing contact with each other; their collective fortunes have become intertwined. I want to dwell on this and its implications.

In this emergent epoch of multiple contradictions that I have labelled ‘fragmegration’ in order to summarily capture the tensions between the fragmenting and integrating forces that sustain world affairs,2 a little noticed – and yet potentially significant – discrepancy prevails between our intellectual progress toward grasping the underlying complexity of human systems and our emotional expectation that advances in complexity theory may somehow point the way to policies which can ameliorate the uncertainties inherent in a fragmegrative world. The links here are profoundly causal: the more uncertainty has spread since the end of the Cold War, the more are analysts inclined to seek panaceas for instability and thus the more have they latched onto recent strides in complexity theory in the hope that it will yield solutions to the intractable problems that beset us. No less important, all these links – the uncertainty, the search for panaceas, and the strides in complexity theory – are huge, interactive, and still intensifying, thus rendering the causal dynamics ever more relevant to the course of events.

In a brief exchange with my mother following the British election in 1998, she told me that her bet was that ‘John Major and all the rest of them’ would now be kicking themselves for not having gone ‘New Tory’ and moved a little further to the left. The New Labour success indicated, she thought, that had they done so they could easily have stayed in power. I was not at all sure she was correct in this, but her remark interested me as reflecting both the impossibility of discoursing about politics without the left-right distinction, and one of the main reasons why its continued relevance to the European political situation is being called increasingly into question.

One of the most innovative proposals of the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 struck between the British and Irish governments was, I believe, the new ‘Council of Isles’. What this effectively acknowledges is that the citizens of Britain and Ireland are inextricably bound up with each other – mongrel islanders from East to West sharing an increasingly common civic and economic space. In addition to the obvious contemporary overlapping of our sports and popular cultures, it is worth recalling just how much of our respective histories were shared: from the Celtic, Viking and Norman settlements to our more recent entry to the European community. For millennia the Irish sea served as a waterway connecting our two islands, only rarely as a cordon sanitaire keeping us apart. And this is even truer in our own time with over 25 000 trips being made daily across the Irish sea, in both directions. It is not surprising that over eight million citizens of the United Kingdom today claim Irish origin, with over four million of these having an Irish parent. Indeed a recent survey shows only 6 per cent of British people consider Irish people living in Britain to be foreigners. And we don’t need reminding that almost a quarter of the inhabitants of the island of Ireland claim to be at least part British.

What is justice all about? What is the scope of the concept of justice? What are the issues that can legitimately be discussed and evaluated in terms of justice? In her book Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young challenges the theory of justice developed by John Rawls and responded to by many political theorists in the philosophical debate generated by Rawls’s book, A Theory of Justice (1971). Young objects to the emphasis on matters of distributive justice and finds the use of the metaphor of distribution too restrictive when applied to nondistributive issues. She wants to widen the scope of the concept of justice to include topics like decision making, culture, and the division of labour.

In Sociological Theory: What went Wrong?: Diagnoses and Remedies (London: Routledge, 1995), Mouzelis provides a stunning and largely successful attempt to establish (or rather re-establish) sociological theory as a speciality within the social sciences which is progressively developing solutions within its own set agenda of concerns, and he then reviews a range of theoretical issues embedded within the work of a wide range of contemporary theorists in order to begin to build up this approach. Whereas many sociologists have rather ineffectively mourned sociology’s slipping from popularity in the recent period, Mouzelis not only provides an effective diagnosis of this situation but also offers a serious prescription to begin to cure the ills. To carry off his feat of derring-do Mouzelis has to descend into the very jaws of hell (post-structuralism) in order to snatch conceptual points which can then be used as levers to return sociology to its historical mission and to regain its formerly successful trajectory – which involves working against the very sources of the material he uses to rescue sociology!

Notes on the Contributors