045-052 080092 Salvatore (D) 7/8/07 08:14 Page 45

The Exit from a Westphalian

Framing of Political Space and
the Emergence of a Transnational
Islamic Public

Armando Salvatore

Democratic Politics and More

N
ANCY FRASER’s argument that the notion of the public sphere
developed by Habermas was primarily intended to contribute a
normative theory of democratic politics needs some discussion.
Habermas’s historic positioning towards such a normative primacy is
ambivalent. The core argument of his Habilitation thesis, written and
defended in the late 1950s, and published in the early 1960s with the title
Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, was, decades later, to feed into the revival
of interest in the public sphere that climaxed in the early 1990s, via the
English translation of his work in 1989 (Habermas, 1989 [1962]). Yet at its
inception Habermas’s study was part of a quite complex effort to cope with
modern Germany’s trajectory of political authoritarianism and totali-
tarianism.
The goal of his project cannot be reduced to a normative concern for
democratic politics. It also entailed some degree of theoretical ambivalence
– and openness to further developments. At root, the project was motivated
by an urgency to cleanse the roots of Germany’s political trajectory that,
until the Second World War, had set the country apart from the club of
Western liberal-democratic societies. At the same time, Habermas’s work
represented a quite heterodox twist within the ‘critical theory’ of the Frank-
furt School (cf. Calhoun, 1992: 4–6). More specifically, Habermas’s
approach intended to expose the danger of a de-democratization allegedly

■ Theory, Culture & Society 2007 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 24(4): 45–52
DOI: 10.1177/0263276407080092

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46 Theory, Culture & Society 24(4)

congenital to the socio-political arrangements of post-war European welfare

states, and in particular to the predicament of the Bundesrepublik. His praise
of the liberal prototype of the bourgeois public sphere went hand in hand
with a diagnosis of the strictures faced by the same model in a democratic
context.
Habermas’s theory of the public sphere was more than a piece of
normative theory of democracy oriented to the Westphalian framework of
political citizenship. It was part and parcel of fierce theoretical contentions
in making sense of the long-term fate of what we might call ‘Westphalian
political imagery’. As such, it could be understood as a prelude to
Habermas’s later theoretical attention to how the limits of the Westphalian
straitjacket might be overcome. Some of the implications of this theoretical
concern were thrown into relief by a work more or less contemporary with
Habermas’s Habilitation. In his book Critique and Crisis the historian
Reinhart Koselleck (1988 [1959]) adopted a diagnostic approach to the
democratic potential of the Enlightenment legacy that at first glance
appeared as opposite to Habermas’s. Instead of looking for a golden age of
the public sphere, Koselleck attempted to show that the roots of all forms
of modern totalitarianism had to be located in the absolutist conception of
sovereign power that thinkers of the European Enlightenment had inherited
from the absolutist monarchies and metamorphosed into the new idea of
collective autonomy and political agency of the body of a free citizenry. The
German historian denounced the lack of political realism on the part of the
self-crowning demos, which was not really an alternative to the illiberal
framework against which it had concentrated critical power. Interestingly,
Koselleck focused on the secret and conspirational dimension of liberal
bourgeois politics. He showed that critique was far from being intrinsically
public. According to Koselleck, the less-than-public sphere of bourgeois
politics was not just a matter of political expediency but a consequence of
the radically subject-centred approach of liberal and radical thinkers,
basing politics on a very abstract notion of the moral self. This conception
laid the foundations of a morality within an inner, and even secret, forum
of conscience.
Koselleck’s view had the merit of inserting the rise of a bourgeois
public sphere into a much more dialectical relationship between ‘public-
ness’ (Öffentlichkeit) as a spatialized representation of public order, whose
seeds were implanted (as also recognized by Habermas) by the modern
European absolutist state, and the ‘inwardness’ (Innerlichkeit) reclaimed by
bourgeois ideology (be it liberal or radical). The seriousness of Koselleck’s
counterpoint is proved by the fact that it was taken into account by the
Habilitation’s thesis of a pupil of Habermas, Klaus Eder, which focused in
more critical terms on the late 18th and early 19th century’s ‘pathogenesis’
of German political modernity (Eder, 1991).
That Habermas was, quite early on, well aware of the ambivalence of
his historic model of the bourgeois public sphere and of its subsequent
trajectory is proven by the energies he invested in what remains his main

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Salvatore – Emergence of a Transnational Islamic Public 47

project: the theory of communicative action (Habermas, 1984 [1981], 1987

[1981]). This theoretical deepening of his work, which Fraser omits to
mention, turned precisely on how one might propose an escape from the
strictures of the Westphalian trajectory. Especially through the traumas of
the 1848 revolution and the Paris commune, the trajectory at stake had been
delineated in his earlier work as one of erosion of critical publicity. Instead
of keeping this free-floating critical power, publicity ended up permeating
several sectors of society, thus becoming a sphere of spheres, a disciplin-
ing force favouring either authoritarian twists or a welfarist degeneration of
participative citizenship (Habermas, 1989 [1962]:140).
Habermas himself stressed a line of continuity between the later
revival of the public sphere and the main theoretical idea on which he had
worked since the 1970s, namely ‘communicative action’. This was
conceived of as a type of action rooted in the people’s ‘lifeworld’ that resisted
colonization by the two-pronged system of economic and bureaucratic
rationalities and therefore provided to the public sphere its principle of
agency and interaction (Habermas, 1990, 1992). By its very abstract nature,
it was a theory potentially to be shifted onto a simultaneously sub-West-
phalian and trans-Westphalian level. A post-national flourishing and a
transnational opening of the public sphere was, in many ways, prefigured
by the theory of communicative action.
At its kernel, what the concept of the public sphere shares with the
idea of communicative action is the notion of acting, arguing and deliber-
ating in common in ways that are legitimated through a rational pursuit of
collective interest. Habermas’s passing reference, at the beginning of Struc-
tural Transformation, to classical antiquity, the Middle Ages and early
modernity, in order to summarize the ‘prehistory’ of the modern liberal bour-
geois public sphere, is basically correct and consistent (Habermas, 1989
[1962]: 14–26). Yet these periods are selectively combined to make the new
type of Westphalian public sphere stand out for its novelty, originality and
typological purity. Habermas does not deny that the idea of Öffentlichkeit
as a functional ‘sphere’ is a key to the novelty of modern public argument.
It is precisely its overly functional character that reveals the ambivalence
of the kind of social integration expected from the existence and working of
this sphere of society. Nancy Fraser emphasizes this functional primacy. For
sure, as evidenced by her, the difference between the functionalism of capi-
talism and state bureaucracy and the function of the public sphere as a ‘third
sphere’ of society (Somers, 1995) is put in relief by a critical perspective
supported by protest movements. Accordingly, the quintessential character
of modernity as a self-propelling system is at its highest at the ‘movement’
level, which is the least feasible to be reduced to a bounded sphere. In the
present world political conjuncture discussed by Fraser, movement has not
only a transnational radius but also a transnational legitimacy. Its political
efficacy is nonetheless, as stressed by Fraser, fragile.

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48 Theory, Culture & Society 24(4)

Publicity before and after the Westphalian Public Sphere

I have suggested that, in his work, Habermas offered insights into how
publicity might be considered as a potentially critical and antagonistic
‘movement’ beneath – and, potentially, beyond – the Westphalian sphere.
He developed this idea in the theory of communicative action. Yet this move
also originated from a fruitful ambivalence in the original, dynamic
approach to the public sphere, in that this sphere – in its historic unfold-
ing in the Western Westphalian framework – was viewed as perpetually
unfulfilled, unable to fully satisfy the criteria of rationality and universality
that it entailed, and indeed required, in order to qualify as a Western,
modern, rational and democratic type. It was a model resting on a
distinctive dialectic between inwardness and publicness, which subverts
and sometimes suppresses some fundamental characteristics of more
ancient and often more complex trajectories of construction of public
argument.
For sure, the Westphalian world and its articulation of the private and
public spheres was first of all a world of religions that were simultaneously
privatized and publicized, via the cuius regio eius religio sanctioned by the
peace of Westphalia. This formula legitimized a central political authority
based on postulates of religious, and later cultural-linguistic homogeneity
of the nation. Through a series of conflicts, the same Westphalian formula
legitimized successive waves of secularization of the articulation of the
private and public spheres. In the world of mature liberal democracies, the
subject/citizen shares with the state the idea and exercise of sovereignty,
which happens to be simultaneously rooted on the national territory and in
foro interno.
The insertion of social movements into the emerging national public
spheres had from the start a dubious legitimacy. At the dawn of modernity,
the movement was still incarnate in the self-affirming radical communes,
the ‘people of God’ resisting the boundaries that were being set, during and
after the wars of religion, by the emerging sovereign states. Religious heresy
was the prototype of social movements and political unrest – of revolution.
Their relation to the liberal public sphere was not smooth. Not by chance,
Habermas’s prototypical, liberal bourgeois model of the public sphere
breaks down through the largely failed revolutions of 1848 and the Paris
commune – an aspect of his narrative mostly under-stressed by commen-
tators and critics.
Fraser’s focus on the who and how of the public sphere are strictly
related to the emergence of the sovereign national state, yet a consideration
of the movement dimension depends largely on what the public sphere is
there for. Without a focus on the discursive shaping of the common good to
be sought, the notion of the public sphere risks becoming a mere concep-
tual device that disguises class divisions, gender discrimination and cultural
cleavages – under the cover of a progressive consensus. It does so by being
hijacked by the Westphalian machinery of reductio ad unum of the politi-
cal will and consensus under the surveillance of a democratic Leviathan. A

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Salvatore – Emergence of a Transnational Islamic Public 49

crucial dimension of the how of the public sphere is that it was never
exhaustively covered by the self-representation and legitimization of the
Westphalian state, even in the heyday of its welfarist developments. At the
same time, the what of the common good made public, i.e. accessible to all
citizens, reaches well into the conception of the political community and its
borders: it ranges from eminently practical levels of common action (like
providing for the poor) to a radically abstract dimension of discourse (the
symbolic and imaginary making of the common, which is a specific task of
radical movements).
Habermas significantly underplayed the role of religious traditions,
and in particular of radical protest movements, in the ambivalent formation
of the modern public sphere. In his old work he failed to search for endeav-
ours within different traditions to shape the idea of the centrality of ordinary
life and the value of communication among commoners as the preconditions
of the modern notion of the public sphere, ever unfulfilled by the West-
phalian rules of the game. Yet in his subsequent work Habermas raised the
question of whether one can identify a micro-level of interaction and
communication that holds society together and bestows a progressive scope
onto the social and political process. The project he undertook with the
theory of communicative action was indirectly helpful in making the theory
of the public sphere less entrenched in a moral philosophy of the free agent
and of the citizen of the Westphalian state. In Between Facts and Norms he
argued that the validity of his theory should not be dependent on the pecu-
liarities of specific, post-Protestant and post-Enlightenment cultural
traditions, like those of ‘Jefferson’s fortunate heirs’ (Habermas, 1996 [1992]:
62–3).
It became explicit that, while the ‘public sphere’ as the final product
of a series of developments (as an arena or ‘sphere’) is largely modern,
European, Western and ‘Westphalian’, the normative character of its
communicative function, the underlying idea of social connectivity and the
public use of reason and argument are not necessarily so.

The Transnational Islamic Public

Maybe paradoxically at first sight, a transnational Islamic public is probably
the most visible and perhaps most powerful instantiation of an exit strategy
from the Westphalian frame – into a simultaneously subnationally and
transnationally based type of ‘sphere’ that satisfies some key presupposi-
tions of Habermas’s communicative action, without fitting into the bounded
character of a national citizenry. The paradox dissolves if we analyse the
reasons for this development on three levels: (1) the existence of a strong
tradition within Islam defining the what of this public sphere, i.e. a concep-
tion of the common good to be made public; (2) the post-postcolonial
collapse of confidence in the emancipatory potential of Third World approx-
imations of Westphalian, national developmental states, with a simultane-
ous recrudescence of themes of anti-imperialist struggles for justice and
dignity; (3) the world economic dimension of globalization processes that on

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50 Theory, Culture & Society 24(4)

the one hand elicits Islamic responses, and on the other favours an exit from
the exclusivity of the Westphalian frame.
The three levels are quite deeply intertwined in the actual world politi-
cal constellations. An Islamic public sphere or ‘public Islam’ is based on
the traditional notion of maslaha – of the common good or public interest
– a simultaneously jurisprudential and theological concept (Hoexter et al.,
2002; Masud, 1995 [1977]; Salvatore, 2007). The notion of maslaha is
increasingly invoked for supporting a critique of the delegitimized post-
colonial regimes, operating under the aegis of international agencies over-
seeing programmes of ‘structural adjustment’. Such a critical discourse
reflects Muslim reformist views of traditional notions denoting justice and
a participative commitment to community welfare like maslaha. This
discourse calls for the implementation of standards of justice and partici-
pation beyond and beneath the national level. It therefore fits both a diluted
Westphalian framework of postcolonial nationalism and the transnational,
at times aggressively universal, idea of a global Islamic community or
ummah.
There is no ‘fiscal’ basis to this discourse of maslaha outside the
national frameworks of taxation and redistribution, but one should not
underestimate the efficacy of networks of solidarity and mutual financial
help on specific issues, ranging from catastrophe relief through education
to support of national liberation movements or of boycotted governments
committed to those Islamic tenets (see Salvatore and LeVine, 2005). Islamic
socio-political movements and networks provide at the same time the intel-
ligentsia and the infrastructure of a transnational Islamic public. Their
reference to a multi-levelled community (local, national and transnational)
is frequently supported by claims to justice, participation and, increasingly,
democracy. Legal implementation does not coincide in this sphere with an
administrative apparatus of a territorial state. Yet the myriad sites of meta-
legal orientation and advice, through the vehicle of advisory legal opinions
(fatwas) or in even more informal shapes, proliferating in the press and elec-
tronic media and especially on the Internet, provide a normative basis to
the Islamic sphere. The model does not exclude the capture of residually
contestable territorial, administrative spaces. Yet at stake is the redefinition
of Islamic normativity or shari’a, the understanding of which has become
more contested than ever. Some parts of the transnational Islamic public,
such as that existing among European Muslims, are in the vanguard of this
contestation and redefinition. This process remains focused on the what,
while it avoids an open determination of the who, i.e. of how membership
is defined, how membership rights are accessed and how authority over
members is determined. It is a transnational public that exalts the movement
dimension to the detriment of institutional crystallization.
One should not forget that, in the historical construction of the Islamic
sphere, the Westphalian momentum was substantially weaker than in
Europe, because it manifested itself most acutely only at the colonial and
postcolonial stages. The political and cultural elites that took over after

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Salvatore – Emergence of a Transnational Islamic Public 51

independence were often incapable of incorporating the wider masses into

blueprints of development, social justice, national dignity and especially of
democratic participation. At the same time, the development of a ‘public
Islam’, even when stemming from battles at the nation-state level, was
always nurtured by transnational solidarity and local activism. Both streams
of engagement gained part of their strength from subsequent waves of
Western-led economic globalization, which enfeebled the states and thereby
favoured transnational communication and financial flows.
Yet the transnational congeniality of the Islamic sphere precedes
West-centred globalization. Islamic civilization has been, since the Middle
Ages, the closest to a global transcivilizational ecumene, with a political
economy based as much on commerce as on a wide non-profit sector. The
growing sense of a globally Islamic, markedly post-Westphalian public
sphere builds on those historical experiences, yet transforms them deeply.
Neither is this sphere restricted to the influence of elites. Traditionally,
transnational fluxes were not restricted to big traders and elite scholars, but
also open to minor scholars, Sufis and pilgrims. Nowadays, socio-political
movements with a strong Islamic orientation benefit from transnational
publicity even if their chief goal is to gain power at a central state level.
Yet, as long as they are not capable of doing that, or not allowed to (not least
for lack of a functioning central state to take over), they can resort to subna-
tional communes and transnational networks – no doubt with mixed results,
dependent in part upon wider conflicts involving those global powers that
govern the exit from a Westphalian framework. Yet affectedness and publi-
city, identity and communication channel, tend to overlap in this trans-
national Islamic public – both in the dimensions of cohesion and unity and
in the fault lines, like between Sunnis and Shi’a.
To sum up, ‘public Islam’ both draws on a pre-modern, pre-colonial
and pre-Westphalian background and is nurtured by post-Westphalian
transformations. The fact that a national framework cannot be completely
bypassed in the functioning of this transnational public sphere reflects both
its potential strength and its structural vulnerability – not least vis-a-vis
inimical global powers holding both the political weapons and the financial
instruments to circumscribe its influence. Structurally, such a transnational
public, with a high level of affectedness, faces global financial and politi-
cal-military powers with a low level of transnational accountability. While
the normative legitimacy of a transnational Islamic public can be measured
at a level comparable to the politically expansive radius of Habermas’s
‘communicative action’ (through solidarity, publicity and mobilization), an
assessment of its political efficacy remains issue-dependent, due to the
multiplicity, informality and vulnerability of funding patterns, legal super-
vision and political mobilization.

References
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Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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52 Theory, Culture & Society 24(4)

Eder, K. (1991) Geschichte als Lernprozess? Zur Pathogenese politischer Modernität

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Armando Salvatore is Reader at the Department of Social Sciences,

Humboldt University, Berlin. His most recent books include: The Public
Sphere: Liberal Modernity, Catholicism, Islam (2007), and (co-edited with
Johann P. Arnason and Georg Stauth) Islam in Process: Historical and Civi-
lizational Perspectives (2006). He edits the Yearbook of the Sociology of
Islam.

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