Against Structural Postponement: On the Legitimacy and New Possibilities of Sharing

The COVID-19 outbreak upturned the lives of hundreds of millions in its wake. As the new virus continues to spread throughout the world it casts brutal light on societies' weak points and failings from structural racism, extreme wealth and income inequality to the rejection of scientific analyses, and the deterioration in the quality of public discourse. This time of overwhelming disruption, however, opened spaces for ideas for change and hopes for improvement of institutions of solidarity and common sociality. The upheaval created by COVID-19 have brought forth new (and old) demands for fairer ways of measuring and acknowledging value creation and contributions to social wellbeing in society. In fact, finding ways to share risks and burdens more equitably and equally in an economically and ecologically entangled and interdependent world seems more than ever imperative for a viable future. This workshop takes as a starting point that institutionalized obligations of (re-)distribution and the scope, reach and reliability of them are not self-evident. With whom we share what, when and for what reasons is socially negotiated; it is a learned practice that is contingent on the systems through which societies order their relations to resources and objects of value, and the existing institutions of (re-)distribution and social welfare (Bear & Mathur 2015; Eckert 2019; Ferguson 2015; Muehlebach 2012; Mugler et al. forthcoming; Widlok 2017). These are contested; when events make visible how existing arrangements jar with factual interdependencies, they are more likely to be perceived as unjust, and demands for alternative institutions may arise (Eckert 2016; Eckert & Knöpfel 2020; Ferguson & Li 2018; Mugler 2019). With the rise of European and other Western nation states in the 19th century socially accepted obligations to share were increasingly conceptualized in relation to the people who lived in a demarcated territory (Beckert et al. 2004). The specific obligations that people had towards fellow citizens was dependent on the differentiation of citizenship - not all being equal, and not all having the same rights and obligations (Moyn 2018). The most drastic differentiations were for long drawn along race and gender, people of colour and women often having no political and economic rights, and different obligations than white men, and many systems for a long time also distinguished between classes, either explicitly or through the privileges awarded to private property (Pistor 2019). Moreover, people in colonial territories, despite belonging to the same jurisdiction, were only partially integrated into these long-term state organized solidary systems. Their common personhood was pre-dominantly not perceived as more significant than the differences in legal status, despite this being in tension with the universalistic traditions of Christianity or the liberal Enlightenment movement and their emphasis on civil and human rights with which colonialism often justified itself. While there have been advances towards more status equality, recognition of common humanity and reduction of extreme levels of poverty since then, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is an agonizing reminder that current institutionalized re-distributory systems are not preventing exploding levels of material inequality worldwide. The crisis hit us all, but those with the least economic rights and power- the poor often being in the majority black and minority ethnic communities around the world-experience the most impact: from the risk of exposure, the severity of infection and scale of the loss of life, to the shattering economic consequences of lockdown measures (UNDP 2020). The pandemic brings globally organized and enforced material inequalities into sharp focus and also documents domestically constituted and structured levels of distributional inequalities that are only to a limited extent transnationally produced and determined (Piketty 2020). This workshop takes the current enhanced visibility of the hierarchical ordering of people within and between states, and the concern and sensitivity for more equitable societies as a starting point for a debate on the legitimacy and concrete possibilities of new standards of sharing. We want to focus the debate on how to overcome the seeming contradictions between domestic and international solutions to problems that entangle these dimensions inextricably. We invite workshop participants to tackle this large question from the following three angles:a.Global economic interdependence and persistent national organization of redistribution We are interested to explore the history of the discrepancy between different fields of international norms. How exactly did distributional norms (tax & social policies) remain far less internationalized than trade, investments or human rights norms? Who are the different actors and institutions that continuously work to either overcome jurisdictional limits, or actually to disentangle states in terms of distribution in the age of global value chains, capital mobility and more generally increasing economic and ecological interdependence? How do their different projects "assemble" to bring forth particular regulatory assemblages in which certain fields are increasingly transnationalized, norms pertaining to natural or legal persons, while in other fields, jurisdictional boundaries determine rights and obligations? b.Visions of global egalitarian reformWe ask: what are the "social lives" of proposals, that reject the assumption that each nation state is accountable for economic justice on its own because of an assumed "natural limitation" of solidarity to established social groups, and which conceptualize institutionalized long-term obligations of sharing beyond national terms? What happened to the global welfare ideas of the leaders of independence that proposed to counter the wealth disparity at the level of nations a "New International Economic Order" during the decolonization of the world in the 1960/70s? Or to the suggestions from activist groups and scholarship that proposed global re-distributory tools (Tobin or Global Wealth Tax) to moderate the effects of financial deregulation and reverse wealth concentration by constraining the income of top-earners and global players? Where are these proposals that have a less state centred image of the world still "alive" and in which contexts do they currently (re-)emerge (Temporary Basic Income, "TBI")? c.National and transnational orientation of demands for more equitable societies Lastly, we want to explore how calls for more equitable societies confront the interdependence of transnational and domestic distributional inequalities, but also attend to their independence (Mugler 2019). How do cosmopolitan proposals, that envision extra-territorial obligations to promote global as opposed to purely national well-being, address unequal distribution levels within states? Demands to accept new global standards of sharing were historically repeatedly countered with the argument that such proposals overlook the blatant inequalities in wealth that were evident in post-colonial states themselves. Moreover, how do current proposals that fight for more equal distributive justice in specific bounded states account for that their governments have no responsibilities to individuals outside their own jurisdiction? Especially, when distributional inequalities in their territory or elsewhere are increasingly globally produced, because international trade, investment, finance, taxation regimes constrain the political choices open to peoples and governments, therefore have a fundamental bearing on human welfare on a worldwide scale. What are turning points that precipitate a change in how various groups of people in specific settings perceive and understand the entanglement of global and domestic distributional inequalities, but also their independence?