Hegemony vs. sovereignty: beyond the rule of law for a global dis-order? Light food for (a-new-cosmopolitan legal) thought

Abstract

Martha Nussbaum, the Chicago philosopher, recently argued that nations and national identities are the best tools for conveying universal dignity: individual autonomy and sovereignty are similar ideas that support each other, but the natural political partner of the Kantian conception of the individual autonomy is the national sovereignty, not its sublimation into a supranational dimension. A concept that she made in a nutshell: the cosmosovranism, which assumes as standing point of the reasoning the spill-over effects of the global values as a consequence of the international (and cosmopolitan) world. Nussbaum’s point of view helps us at thinking at a pluralistic (dimensional) vision of sovereignty. Her approach is even more profitable if we try to reason in the light of the international or global level: the shift from national or traditional sovereignty to the cosmopolitan one sets out a different line of investigation which refers to the impossibility or, at least, the inopportunity to extend both the (European paradigmatic notions of) “common constitutional traditions” and the “constitutional identity criteria” of the Member States in-to a global context (which is marked by an ongoing new cold war 4.0?). The author indeed perceives a certain degree of incommensurability between the notion of the rule of law of liberal countries (not necessarily Western ones) and that effective in some others (China and Russia): phenomenon which can be baptized as global dis-order. Now, reasoning in strict legal terms could not be enough: as it has been said, bypassing the constitutional identity concept in order to ban any instrumentalization, through further legal concepts, is like a dog chasing its own tail. The only remedy, epistemic and semantic at the same time, is the contextualization in bigger dynamics such as those referred to social, cultural, individual conscience ones (in the Antonio Gramsci’s way) assuming the well-known “hegemony perspective” (rather than the sovereignty one), ending up into a mixed one concept of sovereignty: not only legal hegemony, but a more complex one including social and political profiles by which the national sovereignty has been misled into new ordo-liberal democracies without (proper or commonly consolidated) structures. This leads also into the realm of a (regenerating or regenerated) multilateralism. In this respect, relevant doctrine has reviewed a recent work by outlining another way of penetrating and contaminating the international entities beyond the classical terms of hegemony and sovereignty, referring to the “institutional isomorphism” in an ultra-national dimension by which global processes of socio-political changes favours the homogenization of institutionalized organizational models. However, the application of such theory is a phenomenon still to be explored accurately: it is clear though that the sociological side of this investigation support the Gramscian side of the coin.