The Negotiating Table
Imagine a situtation involving two parties, A and B, whether individuals or groups. Assume that it is open to the parties to peacefully co-exist under whatever terms they are able to negotiate. Negotiation happens at the negotiating table, where the employment of non-discursive force is not an option. The alternative to negotiation is that one or both parties can refuse to come to the table and instead seek to make the other party submit to its will by applying any kinds of force that are de facto available to it. For the sake of the example we will imagine that A and B stand in an asymmetrical relationship. Their respective needs and capacities, and hence the kinds of force which they are able to exploit, are not identical.There are at least three possible narratives.
(1) Party A offers party B terms that are “just”. Party B comes to the table.
(2) Party A, for whatever reason, offers party B terms that are “unjust”. Party B, for which co-existance, even on such “unjust” terms, happens to be better than estrangement, comes to the table nevertheless.
(3) Party B does not come to the table, claiming that the terms offered by party A are “unjust”.
Narrative (3) reveals the difficulty of this situation. How are just terms to be judged? Where, as in (2), the costs to B of refusing to come to the table are too great, the fact that an accord has been reached will be no guarantee of its justice. Even the good faith of A will be able to provide no such guarantee for as long as A insists on giving B what is “just” but no more. For the risk is very great that party A, in attempting to guage its offer by an objective standard, will end up reflecting in it the contingencies of the asymmetrical relationship, including those “objective” factors which make it preferable for B to come to some agreement rather than none at all. (The juridical notion of “equity” as opposed to “law” attempts to come to terms with this state of affairs.)
The social contract that the Hobbesian defenders of civilization (as opposed to their Schmittian critics) offer is like this negotiating table. The plotline has not yet been determined once-and-for-all. The process of rationalization described by Max Weber threatens to achieve what the Hobbesians had argued for, namely the monopolisation of non-discursive means of negotiation by one of the parties, “the state”.
posted by mh @ 7:25 PM
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