begun to mean or denote almost anything: the frequent traveller who is ‘critical’ towards her own country, the white Western male who considers nation-states outdated and nationalists retarded, the intellectual who has come to disdain the former buzzword ‘globalization’.3 John Cameron has found nine possible interpretations, from the global citizen to the cultural explorer.4 Others have added a range of adjectives to give an apparently flaky concept more substance or to refine it. We can read, among others, about ‘exclusionary cosmopolitanism’, ‘oppositional cosmopolitanism’, ‘eccentric cosmopolitanism’, ‘consumer cosmopolitanism’, ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ or ‘emancipatory cosmopolitanism’.5 Sometimes cosmopolitanism is just a perspective or a point of view, sometimes it is an activity. Cosmopolitanism may coincide with universalism, or might just be a negative concept, ‘the critique of a nationalist Weltanschauung’.6 If we consider all this confusion, and if we keep in mind that cosmopolitanism might turn into an ideology, it is not surprising that several authors have recently opted to keep the concept open and indeterminate, ‘precisely because specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do’.7 Alas, this reasoning is a bit unfortunate, because the adjective ‘uncosmopolitan’ already implies – or begs for – a definition.
Contemporary debates
Conceptual confusion could not stop a boom of publications on cosmopolitanism in recent years. In particular philosophers, political scientists and sociologists have joined a fascinating debate.8 David Held made a start and developed the theory of a cosmopolitan democratic law in 1995, acknowledging the origin of the concept in Kant’s political philosophy (see Chapter 4 below). Noting the ‘democratic deficit’ of international organizations, Held claimed that democratic practices have to cross territorial boundaries if a commitment to democracy, representation, and accountability should be retained. Held’s normative ideal is a cosmopolitan system where people ‘would come … to enjoy multiple citizenships – political membership in the diverse political communities which significantly affected them’.9
In a hotly debated essay entitled ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’ (1996), Martha Nussbaum argued for our primary allegiance ‘to the worldwide community of human beings’, and for cosmopolitan education.10 Her provocative theses led to a string of essays which discussed her use of the concept of ‘world citizenship’, the problem of normative universalism, and the relationship between nationalism, patriotism and cosmopolitanism(s). In a more recent publication, Frontiers of Justice (2006), Nussbaum criticizes the limitation of the social contract tradition, arguing that Rawlsian liberalism excludes those who cannot take part in such a contract.
Two other US scholars also deserve to be mentioned. Taking neo-Kantian and Rawlsian theories of international justice as a starting point, Seyla Benhabib develops a post-metaphysical ‘vision of just membership’ on a global scale, tackling issues of migration, immigration, hospitality and democratic iteration, which mediates ‘between universal norms and the will of democratic majorities’. She argues for a weak juridical cosmopolitanism and a ‘dialogic universalism’ which avoids the pitfalls of natural law-universalism and normative relativism.11 Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has developed what he calls ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, with people identifying with the local and the embedded, while also conceiving themselves in terms of universal norms and global identities. Cosmopolitanism is, in a nutshell, ‘universality plus difference’, and therefore combines two aspects: universal obligations towards others and a deeply felt respect for ‘legitimate difference’. The task of philosophy is to spell out the details of the relationship between these two aspects, especially when they (seem to) clash. Like Nussbaum and Benhabib, Appiah disdains the idea of a world government.12
Jürgen Habermas is one of the few contemporary philosophers who argue for a world federation, where nation states have voluntarily ceded substantial portions of their sovereignty. He claims that we live in a post-Westphalian world and that a global civil society has become reality, while lacking adequate theorization. He believes in the universal nature of human rights and rationality, while urging governments to put neoliberal market economy under political control, exercised by a reformed and strengthened United Nations.13 German sociologist Ulrich Beck proposes a new methodology in the social sciences and calls it the ‘cosmopolitan perspective’, which overcomes the allegedly monologic national perspective and manages to include ‘the otherness of the other’.14 Critics have complained that Beck constructs a vision of sociology that is a caricature of the actual state of the art, and that existing sociology is actually much more cosmopolitan than Beck wants to admit.15
This short overview cannot do justice to all contributions. French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas deserve to be mentioned. Some authors have contributed one article or book, some are not noticed because they do not publish in English or in one of the major journals. Kok-Chor Tan, Massimo La Torre, Robert Fine, Toni Erskine have recently joined in, but lists of this sort can only be selective.16 At any rate, they show a clear predominance of Anglo-American and English-speaking scholars: the current cosmopolitan discourse has, in spite of its noble aspirations, not yet become truly global.
The blind spot: the current cosmopolitan discourse and history
Many attempts to revitalize the concept of cosmopolitanism are historically uninformed. We may come across unwarranted assumptions, myths, clichés, glaring mistakes or the occasional inaccuracy. The envisioned recollection is often very selective or reductive.17 Here are some examples.
Political scientists and philosophers like to refer to the ‘Westphalian order’, and sometimes claim that our world has entered a post-Westphalian, cosmopolitan order beyond the nation state and based on a global civil society. Robert Frith, for instance, picks up the term ‘Westphalian cartography’ from Richard Devetak and Richard Higgott.18 Historians have countered that the notion of a ‘Westphalian order’ is rather misleading and should be used sparingly, if at all, and with the knowledge that it is nothing but a convenient shorthand. None of the key concepts of modern international law – which are associated with this notion – namely state sovereignty, the balance of power or legal equality, can be found in the Westphalian Peace Treaties, ‘at least not as principles of international law’.19 In Heiner Steiger’s division of the epochs of international law, the magic year of 1648 is completely dropped. He suggests separating the international law of Christianity (from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century) from the international law of the civilized states in the nineteenth century. In the thirteenth century, Steiger claims, the law of nations as law among sovereign princes (rather than states) of equal standing was fully developed, in practice as well as theoretically.20 The concept of a ‘Westphalian order’ also tends to obscure the differences between eighteenth and nineteenth-century international law and legal theories – and differences abound (see Chapters 5 and 6 below).
Another convenient, but misleading concept is the so-called ‘Enlightenment project’, sometimes identified with the ‘project of modernity’. Research of the last decades has shown that the plurality and diversity of eighteenth-century Enlightenments render the notion of a ‘project’ virtually meaningless. As Robert Wokler put it: ‘Genuine scholars of the period characteristically disaggregate such global terms, so as to situate the ideas and discourses they study only in specific and local contexts, with reference to all their rich particularity and texture.’21 According to another widespread assumption, the Enlightenment was cosmopolitan, so we get the phrase ‘cosmopolitan Enlightenment’.22 Upon close scrutiny we have every reason to challenge this entrenched belief, as I will try to show in some chapters (see especially Chapters 3 and 5).
