The Quest for a ‘New Deal’: Opposition and the Global Political Order

Project manager: Prof. Dr. Nicole Deitelhoff

The project dealt with the question of how normative orders deal with criticism. Specifically, it dealt with the role and function of political opposition in the system of global governance.
The project aimed to explore the role of opposition in governance beyond the state. What opportunities do opposition actors have to bring their criticism to the decision-making bodies? Conversely, how do they react to opposition?
The question of opposition has so far hardly played a role in research on global governance. On the one hand, the sphere of global governance has been regarded as governance without government, so that conceptually there is hardly any room for opposition in the classical sense. In addition, the sphere of global governance continues to rely on the idea of purely horizontal coordination between nation states based on voluntary agreement of rules and institutions.
The project, on the other hand, attempted to show that this idea has become obsolete and that governance has long been characterized by supranationalization on the one hand and informalization on the other, which increasingly undermines the idea of voluntary consensus. Under these conditions, it becomes crucial what possibilities there are for opposition to exert influence and how opposition is and can be dealt with in a system that has no unified decision-making center or even a government.

In order to answer these questions empirically and normatively, several case studies were conducted on various oppositional actors directed at international institutions. The aim was, on the one hand, to find out how these oppositional actors understand their own role and what their goals are and, on the other hand, to examine the reactions of institutions to this opposition. Do institutions open up to criticism or do they ignore it? Are there differences in how they deal with different oppositional actors and what could be the reason for this?
The research was guided by the assumption that opposition becomes increasingly radicalized the less space (i.e. opportunity for participation) it is given in the institutions. In addition to the empirical analysis, the project also drew on republican and aversal theories of democracy in order to examine the normative significance and potential institutional anchoring of opposition in non-classical systems of rule.
The empirical case studies on the conflict between the African Union and the International Criminal Court (Dr. Theresa Reinold) and the anti-globalization movement and global economic institutions (Nicole Deitelhoff) initially confirmed the basic assumption. In both cases, it could be observed that the oppositional actors radicalized their criticism (both in their goals and in their actions) the less space they were given to express their concerns. At the same time, however, the two case studies also made it clear that considerably more and deeper empirical research is needed to assess the plausibility of the hypothesis. At the same time, it has become clear that the basic assumption that political opposition is playing an increasingly important role in global governance is valid. A number of collaborations with other researchers working on related topics have emerged during the project period, including at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (Prof. Michael Zürn) on the politicization of international institutions and at the European University Institute in Florence (Prof. Donatella della Porta) on transnational social movements. For this reason, a larger research network was developed following the project, which comparatively examines the connection between rule and resistance across several sub-projects (see point 5.). In the meantime, the project has been incorporated into a larger research network on international dissidence, which comparatively examines the connection between rule and resistance in transnational spaces across several sub-projects (see www.dissidenz.net). In addition, a permanent lecture series has been developed in the cluster (“Protest – Resistance – Uprising. Dispute over political orders”), in which colleagues from different disciplines and with different perspectives have been looking at rule and resistance since the summer semester of 2012.

In addition to the empirical work, the conceptual-theoretical development of the function and role of political opposition formed the focus of the project work. Classical theories of democracy have only a very limited understanding of opposition, either ascribing to it a function of controlling power or viewing it as a source of ideas for public deliberation. Both, however, tend to exclude institutionally unbound and more radical forms of opposition. In contrast, the project attempts to position conflict-theoretical readings of democracy that distinguish opposition as the normative core of democracy and develop a critique of the current democratization efforts of international institutions. Dr. Thorsten Thiel has presented central works on the development of a republicanism of dissent and Nicole Deitelhoff and Thorsten Thiel have produced publications on conflict-theoretical orientations of post-national democracy. They were particularly interested in working out criticism as the normative core of democratic systems.

The most important publications in the context of the project include
Deitelhoff, Nicole (2012): “Empty Promises? Deliberation and Opposition in the Context of Transnational Legitimacy Politics”, in: Anna Geis/Frank Nullmeier/Christopher Daase: Der Aufstieg der Legitimitätspolitik, LeviathanSonderband27, 63-82.
Deitelhoff, Nicole (2010): “Parallele Universen oder Verschmelzung der Horizonte”, in: Zeitschrift für internationale Beziehungen 17(2), 279-292.
Thiel, Thorsten (2012): Republicanism and the European Union. A redefinition of the discourse on the legitimacy of European governance Baden-Baden: Nomos-Verlag.