Another Modernity is Possible? : The Global Justice Movement and the Transformations of Politics

Using and expanding upon the conception of ‘successive modernities’ that has recently been developed within social theory, this article offers an interpretation of the political aims, ideas, and practices of the ‘global justice movement’ and argues that this contemporary social movement is best understood as an expression of the tensions characterizing the prevailing configuration of Western modernity in our own time. Social movements have often simultaneously challenged, changed, and sustained the institutions, norms, and habits of modern societies. Placing the global justice movement in this historical context, the author elaborates how the notion of the creative capacities of social movements has hitherto been discussed in several major theories about social movements and modernity. The article argues that the movements mobilized since the 1990s in response to issues related to globalization should neither be seen as revolts against the demise of ‘organized modernity’, nor as heralding a new type of Western modernity. Instead, the critique and political claims of the global justice movement are, according to the author, better interpreted as expressing a will to realize a ‘third modernity’ in an alternative way that stresses the values of participatory democracy, democratization of international economic institutions, and the strengthening of social equality on a global level. Thus, the movement should foremost be seen as articulating a crisis in the forms of politics and democracy during our present epoch of modernity