Abstract
Both cultural nationalism and democratic theory seek to legitimate political power by rendering it compatible with the freedom of those over whom it is exercised, i.e., by appeal to a notion of collective self-rule. Both doctrines thus advance a self-referential theory of political legitimacy: their principle of legitimation refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is to be exercised. Since self-referential theories base legitimation in a collective self, they must necessarily combine the question of legitimation with the question of boundaries. The problem is that it is impossible to solve both problems together once it is assumed that the collectivity in question is in principle bounded. Cultural nationalism claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it authentically expresses the nation's pre-political culture, but it cannot fix the nation's cultural boundaries pre-politically. Hence the collapse into ethnic nationalism. The democratic theory of bounded popular sovereignty claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it expresses the people's will, but cannot itself legitimate the pre-political boundaries of the people it presupposes. Hence the collapse into cultural nationalism. Only a theory of unbounded popular sovereignty avoids this collapse of demos into nation into ethnos, but such a theory departs radically from traditional theory. It abandons the notion of a pre-politically constituted "will of the people," supports the formation of global democratic forums, and challenges the legitimacy of unilaterally controlled political boundaries.

Arash Abizadeh is associate professor in the Department of Political Science and associate member of the Department of Philosophy, McGill University, and specializes in contemporary political theory and the history of political philosophy. His research focuses on democratic theory and questions of identity, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism; immigration and border control; and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, particularly Hobbes and Rousseau. He is currently finishing a book titled The Oscillations of Thomas Hobbes: Between Insight and the Will.

Please join us on April 25 and 26 for two evenings devoted to an examination of and conversation about the March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake in northern Honshu, Japan, and the subsequent tsunami and nuclear accident. In talks and panel discussions, experts from the School of Earth Sciences and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies will focus on what happened, the impacts of the events, and what the future holds for Japan and other earthquake- and tsunami-zone regions of the world.

APRIL 25 PARTICIPANTS

Moderator:

Pamela A. Matson is the Chester Naramore Dean of the Stanford University School of Earth Sciences, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Environmental Studies at Stanford, and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment.

Panelists:

Gregory Beroza is the Wayne Loel Professor in the Stanford University School of Earth Sciences and chair of the Department of Geophysics. He works to develop and apply techniques for analyzing seismograms—recordings of seismic waves—in order to understand how earthquakes work and the hazard they pose to engineered structures.

Gregory G. Deierlein is the John A. Blume Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the Blume Earthquake Engineering Center at Stanford. His research focuses on improving limit states design of constructed facilities through the development and application of nonlinear structural analysis methods and performance-based design criteria.

Katherine Marvel is the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) Perry Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford. Her research interests include energy security and nuclear nonproliferation, renewable energy technologies, energy security, nuclear power and nonproliferation, sustainable development, and public understanding of science.

For more information, please visit the symposium website.

This group of expert panelists seek to assess what China is doing in the global arena and ways in which China's activities on the world stage have changed China and the international system. Many commentaries on China's rise and growing engagement in international affairs seem to posit inexorable behaviors explained by realist theories about the behavior of rising states or the will, cunning, and putative goals of Chinese leaders. Such explanations often ignore or downplay the many ways in which China's foreign policy and behavior on the world stage are shaped by domestic pressures, structural features of the international system, and the initiatives and responses of other countries.

Please note that there will be no multimedia or presentation materials available for download from this event.