Lifeworld and social integration

The lifeworld as it exists between any two or more social actors consists, at its most fundamental, of an actor's comprehension of objective presuppositions, social understanding and personal competence that enables that actor to make sense of another's social actions, and thus create and maintain social relationships. It is altered through modifications in the intersubjective understandings of social agents as to the particular cultural presuppositions and understandings that constitute their lifeworlds. This captures the point that the lifeworld as a whole is not some form of macro-subject directing social agents, but rather is an interactive achievement of those agents, and importantly, constitutes the possibilities for knowledge generation afforded by the counterfactual presupposition of unconstrained discourse within communicative acts and transmitted from epistemological to sociological via the structural components of the lifeworld. Three such structural components of the lifeworld can be identified. Culture is the store of knowledge from which those engaged in communicative action draw interpretations susceptible of consensus as they come to an understanding about something in the world.Footnote ³² It is linked to the objective world (and thus validity-claims to truth). Society is the legitimate order from which those engaged in communicative action gather solidarity, based on belonging to groups, as they enter into interpersonal relationships with one another.Footnote ³³ It is linked to the intersubjective world (and thus normative claims). Personality is the acquired competences that render a subject capable of speech and action and hence able to participate in processes of mutual understanding in a given context and to maintain his own identity in the shifting contexts of interaction. It is linked to the subjective world (and thus claims to sincerity). Habermas focuses on these aspects of the lifeworld because they establish that we live in a linguistically mediated world in which the lifeworld makes possible the derivation of meaning from speech acts. Human beings must acquire the competence to distinguish the three worlds. The structural components of the lifeworld are therefore the resources necessary to make and sustain that distinction,Footnote ³⁴ and the reproduction of the lifeworld may therefore be understood in terms of the interrelationship between the three structural components.Footnote ³⁵

Analysing the WTO from the perspective of these structural components of the lifeworld reveals that the structures of communication that constitute the WTO as a social institution are rooted in the understandings that ordinary humans have of objective (though necessarily contingent) knowledge, the norms that govern interpersonal interaction, and their own development as practitioners of competent communication. The cultural resources out of which consensus regarding the principles underpinning the WTO can emerge is constituted within a historical understanding and interpretation of the evolution of the global political economy. This may be understood as emerging from the interpretations that participants in policymaking processes hold of the history of the international trading system and the global political economy in general; including the development of contemporary economic principles, the demise of Keynesian economics, the failure of the Bretton Woods financial system as symptomatic of the evolution of the relationship between state, society and economy,Footnote ³⁶ and the ongoing evolution of the global trading system during the period of neo-liberal globalisation.Footnote ³⁷ Culture as it relates to trade liberalisation is thus historical knowledge, but more importantly, the interpretation – uniquely familiar to each social actor – of how economic and social forces have played out and their effects upon both individuals and society. Linked to validity-claims to truth, it provides resources for actors to assess whether trade liberalisation achieves the goals set for it, such as economic development, the satisfaction of political interests or economic integration.

The question of how society is understood by participants in processes of international policymaking requires an assessment of the levels of solidarity that exist between them, the norms and rules of behaviour that reflect such solidarity, and the history of ideas concerning community and the social bond that generated such norms. The individual's identity within global society remains closely tied to the Westphalian nation-state. As a result questions of how global society ought to be structured come to be conceived by reference to the particularist affinities of the nation-state, and as such the state remains the principal creator and regulator of institutions within global society, notwithstanding the growing importance of non-state organisations.Footnote ³⁸ Nonetheless, conceptions of international society are normatively fluid; the increasing role and significance of developing countries in the post-colonial era, the growth of global social movements that transgress national boundaries and what are recognised as potentials for cosmopolitan ethical principles to underpin the structure of global society.Footnote ³⁹ Finally, personality symbolises the agency that individuals within the global political economy acquire through the circular processes of the reproduction of the identity of wider society and the socialisation of the individual's identity within that wider society. This agency is reflected in the ability of policymakers to achieve a harmony between the policies that they advocate through speech-acts (thereby creating their identity) and the identity of global society.

The reproduction of the global political economy as global society can thus be seen as an evolving constellation of these three lifeworld components. The development of the personal identity of social actors motivates their attitudes towards the normative structures of society, and allows them to interpret, discuss and constitute an objective world. A successful society not only entails legitimate ordering of interpersonal relationships, but also provides the individual with an identity linked to membership of an identifiably integrated group, and makes culture possible by being the locus of mutual understanding through dialogue. Finally, culture both transmits rational knowledge, and provides the source for the legitimation of social institutions. The defining characteristic of the process of lifeworld reproduction is that of the prevalence of communicative action, these three lifeworld domains being incapable of reproduction through strategic action exclusively.Footnote ⁴⁰

This account is still incomplete for it neglects the social evolutionary dimension that arises through the inherent potential of lifeworlds to become increasingly rational. Habermas examines a hypothetical society, totally integrated and held together by sacred ritual such that the cultural beliefs, social practices and personalities of all social agents are rendered completely uniform. Social agents are unable to raise or challenge validity-claims. Social evolution as the rationalisation of the lifeworld is thus the gradual emergence out of this imaginary condition of total solidarity – a ‘linguistification of the sacred’.Footnote ⁴¹ Interpretations and practices are increasingly detached from existing normative and historical contexts and justificatory procedures increasingly rely on open and critical argumentation.Footnote ⁴² Rational critique replaces dogmatism and conservatism. If an imaginary world of total social integration is the beginning of this journey, then a wholly rationalised lifeworld is its ‘vanishing point’.Footnote ⁴³

From this perspective, the rise of liberalism is seen as the development of individual freedoms and the ability of individuals to use these freedoms to challenge societal norms.Footnote ⁴⁴ In turn, the WTO is a political body that is charged with protecting these liberal freedoms.Footnote ⁴⁵ Intersubjective understanding as to the role of sovereignty, borders and administrative control in developing and managing trade relations is manifest in the legal norms underpinning the WTO as a social institution. It is a forum for the expression of views, in which economic history is distilled into policy objectives that are formed according to the development of competence on the part of state representatives to articulate and justify them.Footnote ⁴⁶ As such, the increasing participation and independence of developing countries within the WTO, leading to a greater willingness to demand justifications for the structure of global society are representative of a process of rationalisation emerging from the development of state-based form of ‘communicative competence’. Throughout the history of the pre-WTO General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), developing countries played a limited role in trade negotiations, whereas the ongoing argumentation and deliberation of the DDA represents the increasing ability of actors to utilise the resources of the lifeworld to raise, debate and redeem validity-claims.

Systems and functional integration

The lifeworld of the actors participating in trade negotiations clearly does not enjoy such a monopoly of influence upon the social action that occurs within the WTO. Habermas argues that in its utopianism, the lifeworld is overly concerned with how intersubjective relationships constitute global society, whereas it is also necessary to examine how instrumental relationships provide the material resources for these intersubjective relationships to form. Given that an account of social development provided solely through the theory of speech and the development of communicative rationality is deficient, switching to the methodology of systems-theoretical analysisFootnote ⁴⁷ and the development of functionalist rationality shows that the critical theorist can arrive at two possible interpretations of the process of the evolutionary reproduction of society. In contrast to the perspective of the lifeworld, which stresses the oppressive homogeneity of the early lifeworld being disrupted by meaningful social action, a systems perspective stresses the manner by which the transparency of the early lifeworld is clouded through the complexification of society. The development of systems in order to manage this complexity gives rise to a society dependent for its cohesiveness upon forms of coordination that defy meaningful interpretation, to the extent that they develop beyond the scope of the lifeworld, and thus are immune from challenge through the raising and defending of validity-claims. This is a pure system, reminiscent of Adorno's vision of total administration, or a society where the lifeworld has atrophied (as Luhmann's theory suggests is the truth of contemporary existence).Footnote ⁴⁸ The complexification occurs along two dimensions or axes: vertical stratification, which works through power relations, and horizontal stratification that works through exchange relations being established between the strata. From this Habermas extrapolates two steering media within the process of system integration: power and money.Footnote ⁴⁹

Contemporary social systems are constituted through a difference between system and environment,Footnote ⁵⁰ and are concerned foremost with autopoiesis, being the self-referential reproduction of themselves.Footnote ⁵¹ The complexity of the environment surrounding a system means that this is predicated on its ability to bring ‘its own complexity into an appropriate relationship with its environment’.Footnote ⁵² The example of the simple market illustrates the manner by which the complexity of a trading system's environment (the gamut of possible communications that would impact upon the distribution of goods, services and ideas) is reduced within the system itself so as to enable the possibility of large-scale social coordination. The purchaser needs only present an abstract ‘quality’ in order to enter into a social relation that provides resources for the material production of society.Footnote ⁵³ The intersubjective element of this relationship arises through the recognition by the participants that there is a basic distinction that gives meaning to certain action. In the economic/trading system, this distinction exists between a certain monetary value being sufficient or insufficient; in the legal system it is whether action is legal or illegal; in the administrative system the distinction is between public/regulation/intervention or private/non-regulation/non-intervention.

The current analysis of functional integration is concerned with three systems; the global economic system, the global politico-legal system and the domestic political system. The global trading system, according to this theoretical ontology, amounts in its simplest form to a logic according to which certain goods, services and ideas are transferred for money. Since the establishment of the first trading relations, the complexity and difficulty of attempting to provide for the material production required to sustain society has been simplified by the functional differentiation of society at a global level.Footnote ⁵⁴ The basic economic concepts of absolute and comparative advantage are both rooted in the logic of differentiating between societal roles that serve to simplify the process of physically reproducing society. This process of functional differentiation would lead, hypothetically, to a laissez-faire pattern of trade relations.Footnote ⁵⁵ The question of whether trade liberalisation is capable of elevation to a teleological goal of social action is reduced within the trading system to a propositional question of whether more capital – whether it be monetary or material – is produced, in order to reduce the complexity of the system, and allow it to reproduce itself as a functionally differentiated sphere of action in contradistinction to its more complex environment.

However, the global politico-legal system, being territorially rather than functionally differentiated, remains capable of observing its environment not just according to monetary relations but also in relation to conceptions of inside/ outside and self/other.Footnote ⁵⁶ States provide a different form of differentiation in the global political system, one that is based on territoriality rather than functionality. As an institution of global governance in which the state is legally institutionalised, the WTO can thus be interpreted as forming part of both the global politico-legal system, but also the domestic political system. An important point regarding this characterisation is that the WTO amounts, in systems theoretic terms, to an extension of the domestic political system. It is a member-constituted, and member-driven organisation. As systems apart from the economic system, both the WTO and the wider global administrative system are thus not functionally differentiated, as the economic system is, but rather, are territorially differentiated.

The differences in political constitution between domestic and global society render it possible for processes of functional, rather than territorial differentiation to occur. This has led to the subservience of the domestic political system to the economic system, and thus the goals of the state being defined in accordance with reified monetary exchange relations. Whilst both power and money are non-symbolic steering media within the political and economic sub-systems respectively, power becomes to be defined in terms of money; that is to say, that power is derived from money, an insight reflected in the phenomenon of governmental entry as a participant in the economic system.Footnote ⁵⁷ This is a critical point; it allows Habermas to trace the transition to capitalism as the coupling of political power to the economy, so that the ruling class convinces itself that it no longer rules, but rather acts in accordance with economic imperatives. Social integration is therefore no longer achieved through an overt system of norms and values, but, ironically, through systems integration grounded in the economy.Footnote ⁵⁸

This confluence of domestic political, and global economic imperatives, has led to the state and its legal manifestation within the WTO being caught between two opposing trajectories of systems development; the universal arising out of the economic system, and the particular arising from the political. Nevertheless, in both its roles – as global proselytiser of liberal principles, and as economic power player – the state is preoccupied overarchingly with monetary gain, as its strategic interests become aligned with the interests of the economic system in procuring continued economic growth, and monetary gain becomes the objective that coincides most neatly with the reproduction of the domestic politico-legal system.Footnote ⁵⁹ The relationship between trading system and the political system is described by Habermas thus: the development of the nation-state

This observation emphasises the role of the legal system as complicit within processes of functional integration. The legal system, through the development of liberal mythology,Footnote ⁶¹ becomes implicated in the colonisation of the lifeworld, precisely insofar as law comes to be constructed as a systems-medium transmitting functionalist rationality in order to guide social action,Footnote ⁶² rather than – as Habermas argues it has the potential to constitute – a normative lifeworld institution organised through communicative action. As a set of constitutive norms, law increasingly shapes the lifeworld to the imperatives of the economic and administrative systems.Footnote ⁶³ Thus from the perspective of systems analysis the guaranteeing of liberal rights is grasped as the institutionalisation of a market-steered economyFootnote ⁶⁴ rationalised through the medium of law – in this case an institutionalised lex mercatoria.

The foregoing discussion has theorised the development of social evolution as anchored in a process of fulfilling the requirements for the reproduction of the global economic, political and legal sub-systems of society. Each system is steered by monetary relations, and communication within each is thus rendered meaningful by its conformity with the expansion of liberal principles of monetary exchange. The result is an inversion of ends and means; instead of a means to achieving communicative understanding, strategic action becomes an end in itself, reflecting the predominance of functionalist rationality needed to reproduce these systems. As such the aspiration to universal justice that could be fulfilled through the progressive reproduction of the lifeworld through rational discourse is checked and ultimately subordinated entirely by the demands of the global trading system and its interest in its self-replication as a model for the organisation of global society.

The colonisation of the lifeworld

In liberal capitalist society, the process of functional integration leads to the system not merely uncoupling itself from the lifeworld, but returning to colonise the lifeworld.Footnote ⁶⁵ According to this argument, the lifeworld's colonisation is discernible in the reduction of participants' ‘horizons of meaning’ in trade negotiations to gains measured by reference to the value of monetary relations, resulting in an economic constitutionalisation based upon ‘the rule of trade and commerce [protecting] profits above the right to life of humans and other species’.Footnote ⁶⁶ It is not the existence of the market as such that leads to the colonisation of the lifeworld, but rather the extension of the principles of market exchange to all aspects of social life. The increasing ‘disembeddedness’ of the liberal economy from societyFootnote ⁶⁷ is a reflection of an inversion of the relationship between the economic system and the lifeworld. Whereas during the era of ‘embedded liberalism’,Footnote ⁶⁸ the global economic system remained somewhat constrained by the normative resources of the lifeworld,Footnote ⁶⁹ through the growth of neo-liberalism since the early 1970s, it is precisely the principle of exchange that becomes the core social institution. The efficacy of money as a steering medium entails that it does not act merely within the sub-system of the economy, but rather develops to regulate the relationships that exist between the subsystem and its environment (including the polity and the legal system), and thereby becomes the steering medium of other, non-economic subsystems.

The foregoing exposition of the relationship between system and lifeworld in the global political economy provides the social theoretic basis for examining actual social action. The next section therefore seeks to identify the normative effects of the dialectic of functionalist and communicative rationality within negotiations on agricultural trade in the DDA.

Discourse ethics

The normative potential of universal pragmatics comes to the fore in Habermas' elucidation of discourse ethics. Habermas suggests that whilst imbalances of power taint communication, the ‘fiction’ of the discourse ethical ideal situation is posed as a counter-factual inherent within the exercise of communicative competence of social actors.Footnote ⁷⁰ Whereas in their use as a grounding for the exposition of societal evolution, validity claims were analysed in terms of how different forms of rationality determined the nature of a response, the issue now is that of evaluating these same responses as coinciding or deviating from the counterfactual that universal pragmatics itself presupposes.

Discourse ethics refers to an explicit set of ‘rules of discourse’ which provide a basis for a political concern with justice itself:

1. 1. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse.

2. 2. (a) Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.

   (b) Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse.

   (c) Everyone is allowed to express his [sic] attitudes, desires and needs.

3. 3. No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his [sic] rights as laid down in (1) and (2).Footnote ⁷¹

Discourse ethics works by establishing a subtle relationship between the everyday lifeworld and the abstraction of practical discourse. It recognises that social actors have the capacity and the right to challenge not the cultural values of the lifeworld as a totality, but problematic individual norms, in order to avoid the potential oppression of a wholly reified lifeworld.Footnote ⁷² The possibility of thus challenging norms is, for Habermas, the moment of justice, grounded in communicative competence, and thus in the conditions of the possibility of society (and thus the lifeworld) per se (as opposed to the concrete values that are constitutive of particular social and individual identities). In this sense discourse ethics is a minimal ethics. It cannot provide any substantial moral insight that does not have its origins in a discursively constituted lifeworld.Footnote ⁷³

There are two principal forms of deviation from the discourse ethical ideal. One is characterised by a conscious effort on the part of one agent to influence the discourse in their favour. Habermas sums such efforts up neatly as one party making use of privileged access to weapons, wealth or standing, in order to wring agreement from another party.Footnote ⁷⁴ Such action, further including rhetorical action, is not communicative but rather strategic action, whereby one party is treated as an object to be manipulated, rather than as subjects with whom one communicates. The other form of deviation is that of systematically distorted communication, distinguished by its foundation, not in an overt intention to achieve a given result, but by its grounding in the self-deception of one or more of the participants. Here Habermas comes closest to Adorno's blanket suspicionFootnote ⁷⁵ about the impossibility of communication in contemporary society, for the covert nature of systematically distorted communication means that it may not strike the participants as problematic.Footnote ⁷⁶ It can be analysed from both the perspective of communicative and functional rationality.Footnote ⁷⁷ In terms of universal pragmatics, it constitutes an inability to raise validity-claims to intelligibility and truth, thereby disrupting communicative competence. From the perspective of systems theory, it arises when the maintenance of functioning social systems demands the suppression of potential conflict that would result from a challenge to power imbalances within the system.

This then is a microcosm of society. The imbalances of power and wealth that lie at the core of contemporary society could not be rationally justified through genuine discourse, which is thus repressed either through overt influence, or by systematically distorted communication. The repression of the possibility of discursively articulating its own legitimacy, and the ‘intersubjective acceptance’Footnote ⁷⁸ of this repression by disadvantaged groups, is crucial to the stability of late capitalism. It is to this process of repression in agricultural trade negotiations that the next sections turn to.

The redemption of validity-claims in the DDA

In this section I examine two fora for communication within the DDA – the Committee on Agriculture and the Sub-Committee on Cotton – that involve the raising of validity-claims concerning the relationship between liberalisation and development. I present the DDA as a development round committed to reforming agricultural trade for the benefit of developing countries, so as to secure support from these developing countries and its wider legitimacy. However the discrepancies between the utterances that constitute this perception and those that occur within the institutionalised discourse of trade negotiations, violate the ethical presuppositions of those utterances, as they arise out of a repression of communicative action that is traceable to the systemic imperatives explored earlier.

The course of negotiations in the Committee on Agriculture under the mandate of the Doha Declaration illustrates the effects of the atrophy of the lifeworld. I discuss the results of an examination of the minutes of negotiation sessions within the Committee on Agriculture during the period from when they commenced under the mandate of the Doha Declaration until formal meetings ended immediately prior to the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference in December 2005.

This analysis reveals that the negotiations on agriculture display a level of systematic distortion of the communicative possibilities of a meeting of representatives from countries around the world. Whilst this is necessary for the system of political negotiations on economic issues to continue, it also means that the notion of the DDA being a development round must conform to a model of trade liberalisation amongst self-interested territorial states.

Agriculture is the most central issue for the DDA. Following the Doha Ministerial Conference in November 2001, the Committee on Agriculture convened a Special Session in order to fulfil the mandate given to the Trade Negotiations Committee by the Doha Declaration,Footnote ⁷⁹ in which development was central.Footnote ⁸⁰ The negotiations on agriculture are characterised by several groupings of countries that loosely represent differing views as to the formation of agricultural trade relations. Broadly categorised, the US (US) and European Communities (EC) are the primary ‘defensive’ participants, against whom the G-20 – led by Brazil, China and India – and the Cairns Group of agricultural-exporting countries seek to secure reductions in the three pillars of export subsidies, domestic support structures, and gains in market accessFootnote ⁸¹ whilst Least-Developed Countries (LDCs) seek a substantive role through which they can avoid simply being receivers of pre-ordained tradeoffs between the major trading powers. The first major deadline of 31 March 2003 for agreement on modalities was missed,Footnote ⁸² and the Cancún Ministerial Conference failed to perform the ‘mid-term review’ function envisaged at the Doha Ministerial, rather constituting a forum for confrontation and stalemate in relation to the agricultural issues.Footnote ⁸³

In July 2004, after intensive consultations and negotiations, the Integrated Framework was agreed upon that managed to restore a semblance of stability and progress to the negotiations, but which did little to further the substantive aspects of reaching agreement on any of the three pillars of negotiations. By the Hong Kong Ministerial, modalities had still yet to be agreed upon, however gruelling negotiations kept the Round alive, and the deadline was extended until 30 April 2006, fully 3 years longer than originally contemplated at Doha. After this deadline was missed, in July 2006 another conference was planned in Geneva with a similar goal as to that in July 2004, which was to produce a largely political agreement on a framework for renewed negotiations. This failed, with agricultural subsidies again presenting an insurmountable impasse, and the Round was officially suspended for six months. Whilst negotiations recommenced in 2007, as of early 2009 there still remained limited evidence of the possibility of substantial movement towards agreement occurring in the near future.

This series of events is characterised by patterns of strategic action.Footnote ⁸⁴ From the perspective of achieving a level of understanding that can reproduce the lifeworld as it relates to development through trade, the utterances of participants are essentially meaningless, for this lifeworld has been reduced to a set of understandings about the role of the WTO that serve only to reproduce a political system devoted to reaching trade liberalisation agreements. As developing countries called for either ambitious reductions across all three pillars, or for renegotiated and bolstered provisions on Special and Differential Treatment, developed countries focused on strategic means by which reciprocity could be achieved and agreement reached, regardless of whether this took into account the concerns of developing countries.Footnote ⁸⁵ For example, the US consistently downplayed the trade-development link during negotiations, instead stressing the need for all Members to assess their own trade-distorting measures and the maximum extent of possible reform so as to increase possibilities for compromise and eventual agreement.Footnote ⁸⁶

The normative implications of every utterance made within the negotiation sessions of the Committee on Agriculture are relevant to the assumption that trade liberalisation is the best possible means by which developing countries may be enabled to achieve economic development through trade. The challenge to the universalising tendencies of trade liberalisation raised by the fact that all forty-nine LDCs are net food-importing countries whose food security may thus be adversely affected by the increases in global commodity pricesFootnote ⁸⁷ gains no traction, as its only meaningful implication for the negotiations is that whilst multilateral, and therefore universal, liberalisation is necessary for the creation of agreement,Footnote ⁸⁸ such concerns may have to be addressed through other, non-trade related means.Footnote ⁸⁹ Rather, it is only the validity-claim of truth (that is, economic efficiency) – that any given proposal on agricultural trade liberalisation will or will not contribute to an eventual agreement – that is discussed, and acted upon strategically. Statements made by developing countries are only able to be interpreted as factual statements of a lack of progress due to the strategic intentions of developed countries.

It is therefore apparent that strategic action within the agricultural negotiations can be explicated as a product of the functionalist rationality underpinning the economic system. Whilst argumentation and debate occurs, all utterances are concerned with the ‘end’ of maximising monetary values; forging a consensus that will maximise global trade flows and monetary activity. Whether or not this will improve the welfare of poor people in poor countries is a question incapable of being raised and discussed, and in this manner the opportunities for free and rational dialogue are repressed. Technical analysis is limited to the econometric models dedicated to calculating the increases in global trade flows that will result from successfully liberalising agricultural trade.Footnote ⁹⁰ The reasons that are given appeal only to the common aspects of the social institutions created for the purposes of systems integration (legal texts, previous negotiating outcomes), or by reference to steering media (increase in monetary value) that have no normative content.

I now turn to the general nature of the validity-claims that have been made during the course of trade-related negotiations on the African Cotton Initiative, and contend that the normative aspects of these claims – whether or not ‘domestic political considerations’ are a legitimate reason for defying efforts at trade liberalisation – are unable to be raised, discussed, and resolved in a free and rational manner. Rather, it is only claims that truth – that liberalisation would in actual fact be beneficial to those developing countries co-sponsoring the African Cotton Initiative – which are capable of redemption.

Cotton plays an essential role in the economic development of West and Central African Countries.Footnote ⁹¹ In May 2003 a joint proposal was made by Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali entitled Poverty Reduction: Sectoral Initiative in Favour of Cotton (Cotton Initiative) which called for two actions to be agreed by the members of the WTO. The first was the establishment at the Cancún Ministerial Conference of a mechanism for phasing out support for cotton production with a view to its total elimination, setting a date for the complete phase-out of cotton production support measures. The second was the establishment of transitional support measures for LDCs in the form of financial compensation during the period of phase-out to offset the income lost as a result of those subsidies.Footnote ⁹²

In the proposal, the signatory countries made clear their view that the initiative was a clear manifestation of the objectives of the DDA – including the establishment of a fair trading system which took into account the needs and interests of the poorest developing countries – in the specific context of the cotton industry.Footnote ⁹³ In this vein, prior to the Cancún Ministerial, the co-sponsors of the Cotton Initiative circulated a Draft Decision Concerning Specific Measures in Favour of Cotton with a View to Poverty Alleviation that reflected the terms of the original proposal, and related those terms back to the substance of both the Marrakesh Agreement establishing the WTO in 1994, and the Doha Declaration itself. During the Cancún Ministerial Conference, the co-sponsors of the Cotton Initiative pointed out that the wording of the revised Draft Ministerial Text far from reflected the proposed modalities submitted to the Ministerial Conference for adoption in the Draft Decision submitted in August.Footnote ⁹⁴ Several weeks later, a communication was received from the co-sponsors in which it was stated that the proposed formulation in the revised Draft Ministerial Text ‘[did] not offer any basis for finding appropriate solutions to the problems facing the West and Central African LDCs affected by the subsidies granted to the production and export of cotton’.Footnote ⁹⁵

The failure of the Cancún Ministerial to resolve the issue of cotton subsidies was a symptom of the inability of major groups of developing countries (the G20, led by Brazil, India and China), and developed countries (primarily the EC and the US) to reach any form of compromise on general issues of agricultural trade reform.Footnote ⁹⁶ Notwithstanding this, the negotiations on cotton over the next three years demonstrate a consistent trend: that the claims made by developing countries to the normative validity of their proposal are answered solely by reference to the question of the benefits that will accrue from trade liberalisation. The immediate separation of ‘trade aspects’ and ‘development aspects’ within the Cotton InitiativeFootnote ⁹⁷ was inherently counter-intuitive in the context of a round of trade negotiations committed to promoting development through trade, but makes sense with reference to the logic of simplifying negotiations through their reduction to factual questions of ‘help or hindrance’ in the context of wider agricultural negotiations.

Following the Cancún Ministerial, the WTO General Council reached the July 2004 Framework Agreement (the Framework Agreement) for continued negotiations under the Doha Work Programme. In recognising ‘the importance of cotton for a certain number of countries and its vital importance for developing countries, especially LDCs’Footnote ⁹⁸ the General Council established the Sub-Committee on Cotton (Cotton Sub-Committee) in order to implement the decision of the Framework Agreement. At its first meeting, Chairman Tim Groser of New Zealand stated that the basic task of the Sub-Committee was to conduct work on all trade-distorting policies affecting the sector in all three pillars of market access, domestic support and export competition, as specified in the Doha Text and the Framework Agreement. This had to be within the general framework of the negotiations on agriculture.Footnote ⁹⁹ The co-sponsors of the Cotton Initiative consistently highlighted the impact that ongoing cotton subsidies was having on the livelihood and future prospects of cotton farmers, their families and those reliant upon the industry.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In response to these pleas, two trends emerged in the trade-related aspects of the negotiations. Firstly, the position taken by the US was that trade reform had little to do with the future welfare of cotton producers in West and Central Africa. At the fourth meeting of the Sub-Committee in June 2005, the US representative stated that it was the belief of the US that minimal price impacts on cotton result from domestic support, and that instead, the sources of the problems in African cotton-producing countries are largely comprised of increasing global competition, serious internal developmental challenges, and flagging demand for cotton products.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The second trend has been the steadfast insistence on the part of the US that any result in relation to the Cotton Initiative can only arise through the resolution of the issues afflicting the wider negotiations on agriculture. As of 2004 the US was committed to achieving ‘substantial cuts in trade-distorting support for agricultural products, including cotton’,Footnote ¹⁰² this was however to be achieved through the negotiation of a comprehensive agreement on all farm products, not as a stand-alone sectoral-specific agreement.Footnote ¹⁰³

The development of this discourse within the Sub-Committee reflects the predominance of strategic action oriented purely towards the redemption of validity-claims to truth as economic efficiency, and the repression of opportunities to raise claims to normative legitimacy. Only once this occurs, is it possible for US negotiators to make sense of the Cotton Initiative in the wider context of agricultural negotiations, for it can then be located within the realm of strategic action that the US employs in order to fulfill the demands of the economic system – the continued predominance of monetary exchange relations as a means of social coordination. Thus, it can be seen that if the goal of the US, as informed by the economic system, is to increase trade flows globally, then intransigence in relation to the Cotton Initiative is explicable by pointing to its strategic role for the US as leverage for extracting trade concessions in other areas of trade negotiations. The question of whether or not it is normatively acceptable for the US to do so at the expense of African cotton producers is one that is not raised in the course of negotiations, because to do so would be to test the implications of a ‘symbolic’ lifeworld of agricultural trade negotiators in a way that requires communicative action, the resources for which can no longer be sourced from either the economic, political or legal systems.

Seen in this light, the course of negotiations within the Cotton Sub-Committee signifies an overt recourse to strategic action in order to resolve disagreements, in a way that contradicts the status of negotiators as communicatively competent individuals. The key observation to arise from this analysis is that the exercise of functional rationality is presented as rational progress, and accepted as such by those who receive the ‘benefit’ of the system as defined in terms of global exchange relations. This now forms an epistemically closed community, in which the imaginary potential of the lifeworld, conceived as the epistemic possibilities created by communicative interaction between social agents, is rendered inert in the face of systems-maintenance. It is therefore possible to level an anti-foundationalist, yet nonetheless profoundly ethical, indictment of the political praxis of the negotiations on agriculture within the DDA. The negotiations on agricultural trade in general and cotton as a specific issue are founded on the presupposition that trade reform through the DDA constitutes a means of alleviating poverty and promoting economic development in poor countries. However, the manner by which the possible issues of contention that arise from it are resolved, and thus the means of its ‘validation’, contradict the ethical standards that universal pragmatics has shown to be implicit in the development of that original presupposition.

Praxis: challenging discourse through dialogue

Despite the existence and seeming entrenchment of severe ethical contradictions within agricultural trade negotiations, the possibilities of achieving a greater degree of ethical legitimacy within agricultural trade negotiations have not necessarily been entirely exhausted. In essence, structure can never totally overwhelm human agency, for the innate intersubjectivity of social action, even in reified structural conditions such as within the WTO, means that the potential for understanding remains ever present. Otherwise, not even the possibility of meaningful speech would exist.

For Habermas the potentialities for rebalancing the relationship between the integrative capabilities of the lifeworld and those of the system are to be located in the public sphere of society.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ From the perspective of social evolution it represents the realisation of the anthropologically deep-seated potential that lies in social interaction and communication.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The important point of praxeological analysis in this sense is that emancipation is likely not to arise from a process of self-reflection, enlightenment and social revolution as contemplated by a monological philosophy of consciousness.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Rather it is to emerge from an intersubjective process of actual communicative practices within modern social institutions, gradually enabling participants to challenge and overturn reified social norms, and thus give rise to an impetus for establishing normative institutions more reflective of the ethical possibilities of free and rational dialogue. The essence of this process for Habermas is that

The existence of ‘moral reserves’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ for greater levels of communicative action within negotiations can be discerned in the capacity of negotiation participants to resist the suppression of their communicative tendencies that the pursuit of systems-mandated factual consensus demands.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The source of this resistance to the overwhelming of the lifeworld by the system remains in the public sphere, in the recognition that greater participation and communication needs to occur between both civil society, formal structures of domestic politics and the increasingly transnationalised bureaucracy concerned with international trade relations.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This reflects Habermas' belief that future rational progress of modern society may arise, not from a civil society drawing upon foundationalist assumptions, but from social movements that are committed to challenging established norms without asserting the predominance of any particular ‘vision’ of the lifeworld to replace them. Habermas argues that a series of interconnected global crises, including the problem of managing an international economic system while states continue to justify their actions by particularistic criteria, may ensure that the notion of membership of the species will make further inroads into the sense of loyalty to the sovereign state.Footnote ¹¹¹ This systems crisis represents an opportunity for social action on the possibilities for reconfiguring the development of discourse so that it arises not from the internal logics of systems reproduction but from the greater normative resources at the disposal of communicatively competent individuals. In the face of this possibility, greater rational debate and argumentation may guide the evolution of this discourse towards increasingly ethical proceduresFootnote ¹¹² for determining the reconstitution of agricultural trade relations, in which participants are free to challenge the underlying assumptions of both the neo-liberal mode of economic development and the territorial particularisms that limit conceptions of welfare to strictly defined moral boundaries.

Theory: re-considering functionalist and communicative rationality

Habermas' dialectic of systems and lifeworld is a powerful heuristic for critically analysing the progress of trade negotiations. Yet it is not clear that in the analysis of the dynamics of the global political economy, it can achieve a level of insight that reveals ontological truths regarding the history of social forces in the global political economy. Whilst strategic action can be recognised by its reliance upon instrumental rationality, processes relying upon functionalist rationality convert the strategic ends of instrumental action into a means for functional reproduction. This renders problematic the task of distinguishing between instrumental and functionalist rationality simply on the basis that instrumental action is necessary for social reproduction,Footnote ¹¹³ for this may only signify the presence of cognitive-instrumental, rather than functionalist rationality.

I suggested earlier that it is fundamentally important for an adequately critical analysis to simultaneously constitute critical social theory. However, the empirical analysis demonstrated that it is not necessarily as important for such analysis to definitively identify the boundaries, elements and internal processes of systems as if they were physically present. Seen in this light, the lifeworld is thus defined as indeed simply ‘that which systems imperatives cannot subsume’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The acceptance of the possibility of functional integration and the dynamics of systems makes possible a critical analysis of the state of the lifeworld.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Therein lies the critical potential of the dialectic of functionalist and communicative rationality as a theoretical heuristic for normative critique of real social action.