  Contrary to his earlier essay on Kant's Perpetual Peace, Habermas has now pulled back from Held's strong conception of cosmopolitanism. In The Postnational Constellation (2001a; German ed., 1998c) and more recent essays on the European Union, Habermas seeks to accommodate a wider institutional pluralism. Still, he cannot have it both ways. When considering various disaggregated and distributed forms of transnational political order, he describes them in nondemocratic terms, as a “negotiating system” governed by fair bargaining. This is because he clearly, and indeed surprisingly, makes self-determination through legislation the deciding criterion of democracy. Consequently, at the transnational level, the fundamental form of political activity is negotiation among democracies. This demos is at best a civic, rather than political, transnational order. Nonetheless, Habermas links the possibility of a “postnational democracy” to a shared and therefore particular political identity, without which, he contends, we are left with mere “moral” rather than “civic” solidarity. According to Habermas, even if such a political community is based on the universal principles of a democratic constitution, “it still forms a collective identity, in the sense that it interprets and realizes these principles in light of its own history and in the context of its own particular form of life” (2001a, 117, 107). Without a common ethical basis, institutions beyond the state must look to a “less demanding basis of legitimacy in the organizational forms of an international negotiation system,” the deliberative processes of which will be accessible to various publics and to organizations in international civil society (ibid., 109). 