The thesis that the affairs of all people are somehow interrelated is unlikely to meet with much opposition today. However, the conceptual construction of this connection and its more precise understanding cause considerable difficulties. This is partly due to the complexity of the subject, and partly - as we shall see - to the fact that traditional assumptions and conceptualizations make an unbiased approach difficult.
The "idea of a world empire" was "worthy of hatred", Heinrich von Treitschke rejoiced, the multiplicity of nation-states, on the other hand, was a "necessary and reasonable" one. It is not yet so far, but the tendency aims at a progressive unification of the human civilization of all peoples in one social body, Albert Schäffte said at the same time. The means of thought and arguments with which such positions were developed are today seen through as inadequate; but a convincing substitute has not yet been found. Simple and short-circuited contrasts have been replaced by a confusion of occassional, unrelated opinions and a methodological agnosticism (3). Thereby the problem of the world society is hardly posed anymore. It is obscured by the dust clouds raised by the controversies about the concept of society and social theory on the one hand, and the discussion of the world situation in political or economic, game-theoretical or decision-tactical terms on the other.
Since the problem of world society can be traced back to the last pre-Christian centuries, it may be worthwhile to see first how and on the basis of which premises of thought the old European tradition has treated it. It is not so much the details of the history of dogma that are of interest, but rather the understanding of the problem that is contained in its premises and that can perhaps be better articulated today than in the tradition itself.
As a fundamental concept of social theory, the concept of koinonia in antiquity is interpreted from the equality of the natural endowment of man. As equals, and on the basis of their equality, people have common affairs. Equality establishes commonality. In this context, sameness is not thought of as conformity, but as a genus in whose characteristics the essence of man is expressed in his difference from other genera, especially from animals. Based on this difference to the animal, the essential distinguishing feature is conceived as reason. Its common possession distinguishes the human being and establishes the society. This thought persists until the Age of Enlightenment, which concludes from the equality of human reason possible consensus on the foundation and basic equipment of society.
At the same time, that thinking takes on a morally colored, normative style. The moral modalization of a normative expression of expectations means that it is linked to the expression of conditions under which a human being can be respected as a human being; it individualizes and generalizes at the same time. Such moral normativity is not logical for old European society, but it is functionally necessary; for it must maintain its expectations even in the face of opposition and disappointment, and therefore it always relies on categories and procedures of moral reckoning with those who refuse the reasonably demanded consensus - on their Classification as heathens, fanatics, primitives, uneducated, criminals, insane, depending on the prevailing style of the time. Such categorization of deviants remains categorical and sweeping; it serves only to neutralize their relevance to consensus, not to guide factual interaction with them. In this meaning, the social thinking of tradition is practical, that is, normative thinking philosophy. Its normativity, because it is only functional, not logically necessary, is expressed in the basic assumptions about man and the world as nature and thus withdrawn from criticism - until Hobbes, who thinks of man as a morality-free nature, postulates freedom as right, seeks to gain norms in logical derivations, and thus explodes not only the themes but also the functional unity of the thematic combination of old European social philosophy.
The consequences for a world society have been drawn, if at all, only by way of abstraction, and not as an answer to real problems. They have remained utopian in factual as well as in moral respect. Abstraction could only mean, under the presuppositions of the old European concept of society, to disregard all differences between countries and peoples, cultures and forms of rule, and to focus on that in which all people are equal. It was assumed that this ultimate abstract equality also constituted common matters, namely the interest in law and peace.
It is striking that these common interests are still formulated as political problems, although politics itself could not be abstracted, but remained reserved as rule for the politically constituted individual societies (societates civiles, states). Oddly enough! The political function was projected as a problem (or as an idea!) onto the level of the world society, although it could not be sufficiently realized there as a political system. What was claimed to be international law thus got into an antagonistic relation to politics. The explanation for this lies in the conceptual approach itself. The articulation of what was equal and therefore common had been done since ancient times by reference to the political, at first simply because the differentiation of political dominions had replaced the archaic type of segmentary kinship societies. This association of politics and society was firmly established. It was used as an explanation of the same and the common, and it was all the less discardable in the mental transfer to the world society, as the same and the common became more in need of explanation on its system level.
The agreement on moral and political categories of concept formation was therefore not an arbitrary option of older thinkers, nor a mere expression of an inability to logically separate normative and factual statements; it was a consequence of their approach to thinking and their understanding of the problem. The approach to the generic nature of man and to the same that establishes the common had high but simple and indeterminate complexity, was not instructive enough in itself, and therefore depended on political categories of explanation and on moral categories of disappointment handling. The inner coherence of this imaginative syndrome compels admiration; it explains its high plausibility and the compulsion to think that it has exerted and still exerts. But at the same time, this insight brings the critique into a form that aims at the premises; that is, that is no longer satisfied with behaving as value-free or as realistic.
Criticism of the premises, however, is criticism of their ability to grasp complexity. Every theory has to face the question whether its approach is sufficiently complex and at the same time definite and instructive enough to be able to justify propositions which reflect the realities in an adequate (meaningfully abbreviated) way. Before this test question the old European model of society fails. It is already too simple as a theory of modern society and fails all the more if one tries to conceptualize this society as a world society. There is a danger that the too simple conceptualizations of the old European philosophy of society will continue to have an effect beyond their time and misguide our expectations and observations. It could be that we do not perceive the newly emerged world society and therefore do not realize it, because we expected it under wrong categories, for example under the idea of the world empire.
II
The present state of development of social theory does not allow to simply substitute a convincing new solution. To date, sociology has worked with the notion of a majority of human societies, but has not been able to convincingly solve the resulting problem of defining the boundaries that separate different social systems. These conceptual difficulties, too, as we shall see, have their ground in the impossibility of dealing with new situations by the traditional means of thought. We therefore best begin not with the concepts designed for regional societies, but with the question of whether and in what respects global interaction has already been consolidated. As a real possibility, it is a historically novel phenomenon. "For the first time, all five parts of the world serve simultaneously as a theater". Worldwide interaction is possible if and as far as partners can be chosen among all people, as far as this is desirable according to the meaning of interaction, without social boundaries preventing it. An Argentinean may marry an Abyssinian if he loves her; a Zealander may take out a loan in New Zealand if this is economically rational, a Russian may trust technical constructions tested in Japan; a French writer may seek homosexual relations in Egypt; a Berliner may tan in the Bahamas if this gives him a feeling of recreation. What can be observed factually as a state of the world in such respects?
At a rather concrete level of description, we can first of all observe an immense growth of knowledge about the facts of life and the conditions of interaction of all people. Of course, this knowledge is not available as real knowledge of the individual, but in the form of the knowledge of the accessibility of the knowledge in case of need. This background does not remain without relevance for nevertheless claimed ideologies and morals. Further, the scientifically secured knowledge (factually in the same form of the knowledge of knowledge) is universally spread, and with it are the achievements of technology. Research and scientific criticism, in spite of all restrictions of economic, political, linguistic nature, work in a worldwide communication network, and the special social references of the sources of knowledge are neutralized. Besides, there is a worldwide public opinion, which takes up topics under the aspect of news and translates them into premises of further experience processing. With all local, political, dissemination-technical restrictions, worldwide registration and Resonance is foreseeable for a number of topics and is taken into account in anticipation. Furthermore, very large-scale, partly worldwide economic interdependencies have emerged. In spite of all self-sufficiency efforts, political controls and isolations, worldwide possibilities of meeting demand are constantly considered and weighed against the disadvantages of interdependence. National political goals are derived from an international comparison of the state of development in technical and economic terms. Last but not least, a continuous traffic civilization based on world peace has emerged, in which an urban educated person, regardless of his provenance, can find his way around. Almost everywhere, contacts, if they are not risky by their nature, can be initiated under a kind of "normality hypothesis" - that is, under the assumption that only specific intentions are involved and nothing else is going on. It is true that every country has its quota of learn something new (Dazulernquote): in Spain, for example, one has to learn that the railroad will only take you if the ticket is specially stamped, in England that some railroad car doors can only be opened from the outside, even for the passengers. But one does not get into strange, completely incomprehensible situations, in which it becomes impossible to estimate what others expect from one. Everyone can pursue his own goals with normal learning efforts as a stranger among strangers, and this possibility has become horizon of daily consciousness. Incidentally, this premise of a global society applies not only to formal behavior that conforms to norms, but also to deviant behavior - recently, for example, to airplane hijackings.
With regard to such facts, one can ask the question of access to global interactions and note changes with regard to this. Compared with the 19th century, for example, the conditions for access seem to have shifted from private assets to organizational memberships, with the consequence of greater variability in the conditions for access. The high proportion of business trips is striking. It shows that one need not rely solely on the "founding value consensus" in the question of integration, but can take into account novel institutional symbioses of private motives and public purposes. Research on business trips abroad and their motives would be worthwhile. Our real problem, however, must not be reduced to the question of establishing worldwide face-to-face contacts. The world society is not constituted by the fact that more and more persons, despite spatial distance, enter into elementary contacts among those present. This is only a side effect of the fact that in every interaction an "and so on" of other contacts of the partners is constituted with possibilities which amount to worldwide interconnections and include them in the interaction control.
The extent to which such a global horizon of possibility colors or even determines concrete experience and action is difficult to specify. The fact is that the phenomenon of a factually unified world horizon is new and in a phase of irreversible consolidation. This unification is found at all levels of intersubjective expectation formation: as a factual coincidence of the horizon in which (coincident or incongruent) expectations are constituted, as an expectation of the coincidence of others' horizons of expectation with one's own, and as an expectation that others expect their horizons to be identical with others'. Unlike all older societies, world society constitutes not only a projective (reflecting one's own system needs) but a real unity of the world horizon for all. Or the other way round: the world society has come into being by the fact that the world has been unified by the premises of worldwide traffic.
Very early and in unconscious anticipation of this world situation, occidental philosophy provided the formula for it by defining man in his consciousness as subject. This formula says: the consciousness underlies the conception of the world - the consciousness of man, that is: of all men. In this is decided the postulate that allc people can interact with each other on the basis of expectations that they can form in relation to the expectations formed in the consciousness of the other. The subjectivity, generality and freedom of the subject symbolizes this very complicated state of affairs. that the conscious expectation of conscious expectations comes into consciousness worldwide and takes over the control of social interaction. The I-ness of all human beings implied therein is at the same time the modern form of equality that establishes commonality.
III
If one pays attention to the structures of expectations that orient those fields of interaction of science and technology, of economy, of public communication of news and of travel that have become universal, then a clear predominance of cognitive, adaptive, learning expectations is noticeable, while normative, morally pretending and prescriptive expectations recede. Even international politics, if one can speak of it at all, has adapted to this style, as can be seen in symptomatic details, for example in the abandonment of the institute of humanitarian intervention under international law or in the fact that the "recognition of realities" in politics has become a moral (!) argument.
[…]
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LUHMANN, Niklas, 1975. Die Weltgesellschaft. In: LUHMANN, Niklas, Soziologische Aufklärung 2. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. p. 51–71. ISBN 978-3-531-11281-7.