Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 32
External Constitutional Law — The Horizontal Dimension
States appear not only in time (that is world history), but also alongside one another, simultaneously, in a space of shared world. External constitutional law is the sphere of this horizontal dimension: the relation of states to one another, the form in which they recognize or oppose each other, the structures in which a shared world takes shape at all out of many states.
Hegel treated this sphere rather briefly; for him it is the place where war has its conceptual location — as the test in which states assert their singularity against others — and where the law of nations appears as merely formal law without any superordinate authority. This treatment needs expanding today on several points, without needing to be abandoned.
Before turning to the individual extensions, we must ask the question Hegel leaves open: why does the state press outward at all? He takes it as given that states are related to one another, and describes the forms of this relation — recognition, treaty, war. He does not derive it.
The derivation can be drawn from what this volume has developed up to this point. Every developed shape of objective spirit produces a surplus that presses beyond its boundaries, and there are four such surpluses, corresponding to the spheres traversed. [KF]
The legal surplus: Functioning legal orders create trust and predictability. Because cross-border transactions need the same security, dominant legal systems get exported along with them — and with that a competition of legal orders begins, one Hegel’s §333 does not know, because it presupposes a developed world economy.
The economic surplus presses in three directions. Whoever produces more than they consume must export, and thereby enters into competition with other exporters. Whoever depends on energy, raw materials, and intermediate goods becomes vulnerable to coercion as soon as someone else controls the supply. And accumulated capital seeks investment beyond the border.
The political surplus: A state that secures its monopoly on violence internally must defend it externally, because threats do not stop at the border. From this follows the drive to organize one’s own security beyond one’s territory — and the collision with the security claims of others.
The cultural surplus: Successful forms of life produce models that spread and challenge other self-understandings.
Two qualifications belong here at once. The “must” designates structural imperatives, not mechanical laws: how strongly a state develops them depends on its power, its entanglement, and its independence. A great power projects all four actively; a small state tends to undergo them rather than exercise them. And what is reasonable self-organization internally becomes coercion externally — not out of ill will, but from the logic of the matter itself.[1]
Against this background, the following extensions should be read.
First, the reality of states today is pervaded by communicative, economic, and ecological networks that Hegel did not have before him in this form. The metabolic relation developed in Part II (II.3) now unfolds predominantly across borders — through global supply chains, international financial markets, migration, shared ecological conditions. The geographical differences that once isolated forms of life from one another are increasingly bridged by transport and communication (cf. II.3); states no longer live in a world where their inside would be clearly separated from their outside, but in a nexus in which internal reproduction depends on the external, and vice versa.
Second, a limited but real practice of supranational structures has developed out of this — from treaties under international law through international organizations (the United Nations, the WTO, the IMF, regional alliances such as the EU) to transnational standards (in technology, in law, in ecology). These structures do not have the status of a superordinate state — which Hegel rightly held to be impossible — but neither are they what he called merely formal international law. They are a distinct form of mediation between states, one that at once limits the risk of conflict and generates new levels of conflict.
Third — and this is methodically the most important point — states are not the only organizing principle by which the horizontal dimension is structured. A second level, one that cuts across individual states, is that of civilizations. This will become clearer in the following section on absolute spirit; here it need only be noted that the relation of civilization and state is historically variable. In the Roman world, civilization and state largely coincided during the imperial phase; in classical Greece, many city-states belonged to a single civilization; in Chinese history, phases of a unified imperial structure alternate with phases of a multi-state system within the same civilization. Today one can roughly distinguish several major civilizational spheres — the Western (itself further divided into Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox lines, which still mark noticeable boundaries within Europe today), the Islamic, the Indian, the Chinese, as well as the regional entanglements of South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. States move within these civilizational spheres and are shaped by them. Language and religion are the two main axes along which civilizations are sorted — where language is not only a means of communication but also a trace of historical expansions (the Romance-language countries, the English-speaking world, and the Spanish-speaking world are traces of colonial expansion).
A detailed analysis of how states and civilizations interact today — conflict and cooperation, competition and integration, the handling of ecological and technological threats, the unequal power relations between civilizational spheres — belongs in a study of its own. The point to be made here is methodological: the horizontal dimension of states is not only the relation of states as such, but always already their embeddedness in civilizational contexts that have their place in absolute spirit.
- Elaborated in [[grenzen:1]]. ↩︎