Transnational Discourses between Facts and Norms. Toward a Two-Track Model of the Public Sphere

Abstract

This paper investigates how and to which extent the model of the liberal public sphere, firstly outlined by Jürgen Habermas and later developed by some of his scholars, can be translated into a global context. Such an idea of a transnational publicity will be considered both from a normative idealizing perspective, according to which the discursive public activities aim at legitimizing actual democratizing processes beyond the national boundaries, and from a diagnostic perspective, which focuses on the critical power that post-national publics exercise against relations of domination on the global level. In order to maintain both perspectives, and to question the Habermasian preference for the normative one, I am proposing a two-track model of the transnational public sphere illustrating how ideal and normative aspects are interwoven with factual and non-ideal ones.

Keywords

• Habermas
• facts
• norms
• public
• power