Empire in the Global Commons: American Exceptionalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Environmentalist Dilemma

15 Pages Posted: 4 May 2009

See all articles by Sudhir Chella Rajan

Sudhir Chella Rajan

Indian Institute of Technology Madras

Date Written: April 28, 2007

Abstract

Nationalism, in the U.S. case, has a messy connection with the ideology of exceptionalism, which as Daniel Rodgers argues, is associated with a need to "imagine everyone else's history" as much as its own. Exceptionalist ideology is thereby not simply confined to an internal conception of uniqueness; it frequently drives a program for external action, often as conquest (as in British exceptionalism or German Sonderweg), or in America’s case, as a quest to reshape the world along a moral axis that it casts in universalist terms. Universalist, perhaps, but the nation that sits outside of history and refuses connection with the rest of the world prefers to think in terms of an eventual convergence to its norms (think “democracy” and “markets”). I use Thomas Friedman (journalist) and Mathias Risse (political philosopher) as interlocutors to show how their resistance to cosmopolitanism betrays an underlying anxiety driving an agenda of "explanatory nationalism" (Thomas Pogge's phrase). Both, I argue, are "convergence theorists," i.e., believers that the economic and political order of the rest of the world could converge (for Friedman, explicitly towards the American ideal; for Risse, nothing quite so crude, but nevertheless pointing in the same direction) as long as countries themselves take the initiative. Together, they act as gatekeepers of a liberal moral order in a post-Cold War globalized world with a single remaining superpower. The risk is that in a world increasingly haunted by environmental catastrophe as well as global social dissent, this gatekeeper tendency could backfire badly to empower neoconservatism. American environmentalists are especially likely to be caught on the wrong foot unless they avow an unambiguous cosmopolitan agenda that is driven by principles of global justice.

Keywords: exceptionalism, nationalism, USA, environmentalism

Suggested Citation

Rajan, Sudhir Chella, Empire in the Global Commons: American Exceptionalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Environmentalist Dilemma (April 28, 2007). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1396300 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1396300

Sudhir Chella Rajan (Contact Author)

Indian Institute of Technology Madras ( email )

Sardar Patel Road
Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600036
India

HOME PAGE: http://www.iitm.ac.in

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