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within some international institutions, such as the Global Environment Facility (Payne and
Samhat 2004). In that body, NGOs participate directly in meetings that decide the fate of
development projects and virtually all agency documents are presumed to be public. However,
transnational deliberators could openly debate alleged threats to international peace and security,
potential policy responses to those threats, and the role of American power in implementing
desired responses. In other words, American foreign policy might be democratized and
potentially legitimated if subjected to close scrutiny by a transnational public sphere.
Jürgen Habermas, the Frankfurt School critical theorist, has long argued that by
deliberating together about common problems, members of a community can seek and attain
common understandings about truth in a public sphere.
5
There are some obvious deficiencies
inherent in an “international public sphere,” however, which could make the prospect of
interstate discussions, such as those in and out of the UN Security Council preceding the war in
Iraq, quite problematic. First, interstate communication would probably be tainted by significant
disparities in “weapons, wealth or standing” (Habermas 1982, 272). Such material differences in
power potentially distort any communicative process. In this case, the virtually unprecedented
material power of the US could well warp any nation-level discussions about the potential use of
that power. Moreover, questions of security or foreign policy are often matters of “high” politics
for states, and a great deal of policy discussion in these areas traditionally lies outside the public
sphere because it occurs privately, ostensibly to protect states’ tightly held secrets. Given these
kinds of limitations on international discussion, it is not especially surprising that Habermas
(2002) acknowledged before the Iraq war began that the transatlantic debate about it seemed to
feature a “kind of systematically distorted communication.”
5
Of course, by definition, a public sphere must be all-inclusive and cannot favor the powerful – and actors must be
oriented toward finding truth.
Convention