Postnationale Konflikte und der Wandel des Politischen. Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der internationalen Beziehungen

The article offers a macro-sociological view on the evolution of postnational conflicts. It starts with a discussion of the concept of the political, developed by postmodern theorists like Lefort and Laclau, and argues that this concept could help us to understand both the changes within world society and the role new conflicts play within these changes. The concept of the political describes how societies symbolise their identity. The classical concept here is the nation state and the territorial construction of political community. The dismantling of world society’s political system is associated with the erosion of this nation state based model of the political. Two consequences could be drawn from here: First, the evolution of world society goes along with a pluralisation of models of the political, e.g. a global, a national and a sub national one. And second, world society today is characterized by conflicts between these concepts of the political.