As polities become more and more globally interdependent and enmeshed in an ever-growing number of international treaties, agreements, and conventions, new and distinctly political arguments for cosmopolitanism have become more prevalent. Whereas previous forms of cosmopolitanism have emphasized issues of distributive justice, the current revival focuses on the political institutions in which such principles ought to be embedded. The impetus for such a political cosmopolitanism is the emerging awareness of how much globalization has already transformed existing institutions and given rise to new forms of governance that in some cases replace older and ineffective ones.1 Political cosmopolitans argue that with interconnection increasing among societies at an unprecedented pace and scale, a multitude of far-reaching problems and transnational harms have emerged that cannot be dealt with in the current institutional framework. On the other side stands a chorus of anti-cosmopolitans, from liberal nationalists to civic republicans and communitarians of various sorts. They argue that not only does the nation state still play a major role in the integration of modern global societies but also that other international forms of governance will be at best ineffective or at worst despotic, and probably both. But as important as this empirical dispute about globalization may be, the main fault lines are normative. Anti-cosmopolitans insist that the nation state is unique in its capacity to realize important political values, such as solidarity, democracy, and liberty. Cosmopolitans argue, on the contrary, that the nation state’s claims to sovereignty now stand in the way of solving pressing problems of political violence and the regulation of transnational flows of information, goods, and peoples. While anti-cosmopolitans argue that solidarity and citizenship require exclusive membership and control over territory, cosmopolitans counter that just such boundaries are no longer able to secure these political goods in culturally and territorially bounded political communities. At the same time, cosmopolitans must accept that such political goods are unevenly distributed in international society.
The debate between cosmopolitans and anti-cosmopolitans already raged in the late eighteenth century, as philosophers began to argue that the dynamism and violence of modern society required cosmopolitan political integration. At the same time, Hegel and others proposed that the state was the proper solution to problems of social fragmentation and cultural pluralism. It did so, Hegel argued, by creating the boundaries and monopoly on power within them sufficient for new administrative institutions and new forms of ethical identity and membership. These solutions have long been put into question by the critics of the nation state at least since Marx deemed it “an illusory community.” In this regard, I want to argue that Hegel ought to be considered a key figure in the debate about modern political cosmopolitanism. While most philosophers in this century simply assume that the nation state is their reference point, Hegel provides specific and powerful arguments in its favor through its integrative role in modern societies characterized by such rapid pace and large scale that the dynamism of social interaction threatens communities with fragmentation and disintegration. His anti-cosmopolitanism is distinctly political rather than moral: he explicitly defends the internal and external sovereignty as a means for solving the problems of pace and scale. Only a sovereign state is bounded enough to be a unified and differentiated whole and organized enough to be a delimited individual among other individual communities in a pluralist international society.
While many philosophers have emphasized the exclusive character of membership as Hegel does in The Philosophy of Right, no work of modern political philosophy provides a more explicit defense of a political as opposed to moral anti-cosmopolitanism. Hegel clearly makes this distinction in the beginning of one section entitled “The Administration of Justice,” in which he argues that Abstract Right as it is realized in modern civil society requires that all human beings be recognized as universal persons, “in which respect all are identical.” This universality is cosmopolitan to the extent that in it “a human being counts as such because he is a human being, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, etc.” (§ 209). However, as Hegel goes on to argue, abstract right should not be generalized into an abstract political principle or set of political demands. “This consciousness, which is the aim of thought, is of infinite importance, and it is inadequate only if it adopts a fixed position—for example, as cosmopolitanism—in opposition to the concrete life of the state.”2 Following Richard Miller, we might say that Hegel is here distinguishing between a weaker universal “cosmopolitan respect” from the stronger “patriotic concern” for one’s nearer, similarly disposed fellow citizens.3 While there is something right about Hegel’s distinction between a moral cosmopolitanism directed to persons and a political demand for certain sorts of institutions, my goal is to show how political cosmopolitanism escapes his criticism in an age when distinctions between the inside and outside of the polity between the rights of citizens and noncitizens begin to break down. Recent political cosmopolitanism may best escape this criticism by adopting a strategy in some respects similar to Hegel’s solution to the problems of the integration of modern society in The Philosophy of Right.
My argument has three steps. First, I look briefly at the main contemporary criticisms of a specifically political cosmopolitanism and formulate them as a dilemma between legitimacy and effectiveness at the international level. Next, I show how Hegel improves upon these criticisms by explicitly arguing for the importance of bounded communities in achieving the political goods of administration and membership. It is precisely these goods, however, that the state is no longer exclusively able to deliver as globalization extends many horizontal and vertical social relationships across borders and establishes new forms of authority and cosmopolitan politics. Finally, I propose a cosmopolitan alternative in which the administrative failures of bounded political communities and the emergence of a self-governing international civil society raise institutional problems for the realization of freedom. Any viable political solution to the problems that threaten the goods of administration and membership extends, organizes and legitimates citizenship beyond state boundaries. To the extent that it is based on an ideal of social freedom, this political alternative to a philosophy oriented to the modern state suggests a republican form of political cosmopolitanism that goes beyond the more common liberal form.
Even if I take Hegel to be making explicit the pervasive assumption of political philosophy that I want to reject, I do not here confine myself to the familiar lines of the cosmopolitan criticism of Hegel’s conceptions of international relations and modern warfare. While Hegel is implacably opposed to political cosmopolitanism, I argue that he can be enlisted as an ally for this republican form in two respects. First, Hegel’s defense of the modern corporation might show how cosmopolitan citizenship can successfully deal with multiple memberships and allegiances. Second, his defense of the modern state involves forms of administration, representation, and deliberation that avoid the potential problems of neofeudalism in the multilayered and overlapping institutions and authorities that would characterize any cosmopolitan political order. However useful Hegel’s solutions may have been, applying them to globalized societies requires the rather un-Hegelian and republican conception of cosmopolitan citizenship on the international level. A viable political cosmopolitanism would nonetheless have to adopt something like the Hegelian strategy with regard to the legitimacy of state power: but instead of the state, it would argue that international institutions are necessary not only as solutions to the global problems of social integration but also as locations for universal activities of citizenship and, hence, for the objective and self-conscious realization of freedom.
Like many critics of cosmopolitanism today, Hegel’s criticism does not simply reject it out of hand. Indeed, he accepts its core idea of universal personhood as a constituent part of any reflective and universal morality. As such, its universality, he says, belongs to “thought” rather than to the reality of political practices or institutions. Similarly, many contemporary anti-cosmopolitans see politics as necessarily taking place in the context of a specific community, or in Hegelian terms, as requiring the ideal of being a citizen of a free state with specific institutions and communal practices rather than an abstract citizen of the world.4 Furthermore, in most discussions, republicanism and cosmopolitanism are taken to have contrasting, if not conflicting, normative aspirations.5 Cosmopolitanism is “thin” and abstractly universal without the conflicts at the heart of modern politics and thus unable to articulate the basis for a “thick” citizenship in a republican political community. This commonly accepted way of dividing up the conceptual and political terrain is, however, increasingly misleading in the age of the global transformation of political authority. Cosmopolitanism is indeed opposed to those forms of political identity that are linked to another political ideal: nationalism, whether liberal or illiberal. Because being a citizen of a free state places one in a particular set of obligations and ties of solidarity, republicanism has often been considered a communitarian ideal. In light of such relationships, cosmopolitanism might appear as “thin” and “abstract” as Toulmin, Walzer, and Gutmann have argued it is.6 Indeed, the original context of Diogenes’ assertion that “I am a citizen of the world” was just such a fallacy of composition: Diogenes was concerned to deny the validity of any local obligations, such as the duty to pay taxes, since the duties of the cosmopolitan citizen must only be universal ones.
As opposed to thin or abstract versions, a republican cosmopolitanism must attempt to reconcile elements of the republican and cosmopolitan sides of its ideal: It demands a universalist political framework within which people act as citizens by bringing to bear their particular interests, identities, and perspectives on common governance and problem solving. It requires new forms of cosmopolitan governance rather than new methods for aggregating or representing various interests. In good Hegelian fashion, it is concerned with the reality of the freedom of those whom it governs once they are regarded both as citizens of the world and citizens of a state. This reconciliation of the particular and the universal need not be any more abstract than that of any pluralist, constitutional state, and it cannot be so thick that citizenship in one location puts citizens at odds with citizenship as practiced in other institutions and associations. The issue is then how this reconciliation is to be effected, not that cosmopolitanism is a merely abstract or universal doctrine that ignores the rightful claims and goods of particular communities.
This thick and political solution to the problem of cosmopolitan identity is not without its own price. The current and obvious absence of many types of functioning governance institutions leads anti-cosmopolitans such as Dennis Thompson to argue against searching for solutions to the problems of globalization in “sites outside the framework of states.”7 Against those who call for international democracy to solve global problems, he disputes the desirability of both centralized and decentralized solutions: Neither cosmopolitanism with its emphasis on strong supranational institutions, nor civil societarianism with its emphasis on transnational associations, NGOs, and social movements will be sufficient to displace the role of the state as a location for democratic deliberation. Without clear integrative mechanisms, both strong institutions and a vibrant civil society will, according to Thompson, “only compound the deficiencies of both.” Since the possibilities for a cosmopolitan rather than national democracy are thereby exhausted, cosmopolitans seem trapped on the horns of a dilemma: either international institutions become strong enough to be effective, and then they cannot be legitimate, or they can be fully democratically legitimated as informal, consensual, and pluralistic associations, and then they cannot be effective. In either case, the dilemma shows that cosmopolitanism remains a merely abstract ideal, lacking an ethical basis in the life of some community or the institutional basis of functioning institutions that all recognize as legitimate even when they act against their interests and oppose their will.
This criticism assumes that we remain comfortable with the legitimacy and effectiveness of the nation state, as well as its capacity to promote our freedom. The problem is compounded due to the uncertainties surrounding all relatively large-scale forms of modern political organization as locations for political identity and the exercise of citizenship. Even if early modern republicans could appeal to free city states, the much larger and diverse nation state has seemed to most in this century to be the proper location for such political identity. Given current social circumstances, the main difficulty is the scale of modern states and other forms of political community. They are either “too large” or “too small”: too large to be the locus of solidarity and too small to solve most global problems effectively.8 They are either “too slow” or “too fast”: too slow to check the flow of capital and information; too fast for accountability when it is effective. If states are unable to perform such tasks, they are also not an exclusive location for freedom.
This problem of finding a location for freedom and effective citizenship in large-scale political communities presents a challenge to both universalist and particularist attempts at reconciliation. At the most particularist side of this spectrum, liberal nationalists argue that the nation state is now the only way to realize democratic ideals.9 Liberal nationalists argue that no other large organization is able to command the allegiance of its citizens and count on the fairly robust and already existing ties of solidarity among them needed to sustain a shared political life amid ever-present conflicts. On the universalist side, cosmopolitan liberalism focuses on the fate and prospects of individuals and thus aims to identify principles of distributive justice “that are acceptable when each person’s prospects, rather than the prospects of each society or people, are taken fairly into account.”10 Both forms of liberalism repeat the cosmopolitan dilemma on their own terms: While cosmopolitan liberalism provides only general moral criterion of legitimacy, liberal nationalism argues for the state solely on the basis of its historically contingent effectiveness in forging ties of solidarity. Both leave the Hegelian opposition between the reality of political life in state and its moral inadequacies from a universal theory of justice in place.
The only remaining cosmopolitan way out this dilemma of legitimacy and effectiveness is both a political and institutional cosmopolitanism, the precise counterpart to Hegel’s own account of differentiation and integration within the modern state. Hegel’s own political solution to modern social integration fails precisely because of a cosmopolitan dilemma buried in his formulation of the problem. The nation state did potentially offer the sort of reconciliation of universality and particularity that Hegel demanded, but only by integrating modern societies through political sovereignty and ethical boundaries. As modern social activities and ties become spatially and temporally extended in a global civil society, what is lacking now is precisely the possibility of political organization and differentiation at a similar scale as the horizontal ties that globalization establishes. As opposed to the cosmopolitan dilemma, the anti-cosmopolitan dilemma that confronts the Hegelian solution is an inherent dialectic between the national and international levels of organization in the nation state. Hegel’s political anti-cosmopolitanism cannot do justice to the deeper problems that make it impossible for the state to maintain the ethically limited form of internal and external sovereignty that Hegel envisioned. Indeed, the international dimension of any modern state puts it in inescapable relations of interdependence with other states and of subordination to the supervision and authority of global civil society. Under these conditions, modern freedom cannot be realized in bounded communities organized as sovereign states alone but only in an institutionally organized and democratic form of international society. This dialectic of interdependence shows that the modern state is neither a closed nor a complete community in the Hegelian sense.
In Political Liberalism, Rawls states the underlying assumption of much of modern political theory: that a bounded political community is necessary to develop a conception of justice for a well-ordered society. Any political society, he argues, is “a complete and closed social system.” It is complete in that “it is self-sufficient and has a place for all the main purposes of human life,” and it is closed, in that “entry into it is only by birth and exit only by death,” so that we may “leave aside entirely relations with other societies and postpone all questions of justice between peoples until a conception of justice for a well-ordered society is at hand.”11 Even if Rawls later argues in his Law of Peoples that justice at the level of international society applies to peoples rather than to states, he still accepts that “there must be boundaries of some kind” in order that states may function so that peoples determine their own rules of membership.12 The methodological fiction of a closed political society still guides the constructivist approach to developing a conception of justice for a well-ordered society.
Hegel agrees with Rawls that a modern society needs boundaries, since without them a politically organized community sustained by a shared form of ethical life would be not be possible. To be politically organized is to be a state, and to be a state is to be a closed and complete and thus bounded community (however open it is in its other forms of social organization and however socially and culturally heterogeneous its members are). Further, states must be organized so as to constitute themselves as unified and self-sufficient wholes: “the state as actual is essentially an individual state and beyond that a particular state,” one of a plurality of modern states. As an individual (ein Individuum), it is closed and complete enough to exclude other individuals, in this case other states by analogy to the relation to other persons.13 It also must be large enough to defend itself from other states and yet also small and compact enough (in contrast with an empire) to be self-determining, effectively administered and to have a shared cultural basis for solidarity among citizens. State borders and sovereignty go hand in hand: To exercise sovereignty over a territory and thus perform its functions for its citizens and its citizens alone, the state must mark and maintain an inside and an outside, external and internal ways to maintain communal integrity.
Even as a defender of boundaries, Hegel already saw that modern societies are not organized so as to achieve closure easily. Instead they are organized around two strongly contrasting and often conflicting structural principles: one is the internal, hierarchical, and political sphere of the state, and the other the external, horizontal, and socioeconomic sphere of civil society.14 As the sphere of difference, civil society is not organized politically but on its own principle of nonintentional or “external” interdependence of the system of needs without limits (§ 195, § 199) and ceaseless horizontal expansion and dynamism and “hence has no limit” other than contingent ones introduced by external force. By contrast, the state is the sphere of unity and universality that is organized hierarchically by principles and dispositions of self-limitation (§ 260). “When the activity of civil society is unrestricted,” when a modern society “is occupied internally with expanding its population and its industry” (§ 243), unlimited civil society introduces problems of the modern pace and scale of social interaction that can only be solved by placing it within the larger and regulatory context of a politically organized community and in that way check those tendencies that work against such closure and self-sufficiency.
In attempting to solve the problem of horizontal expansion without a controlling hierarchy, Hegel appeals to boundaries as the basis for social organization so often in The Philosophy of Right precisely because they make certain social relationships and compensating political good possible. Even in civil society, membership boundaries, for example, serve the same purpose in securing a central benefit of boundaries, the goods of membership.15 “The corporation has the right to look after its own interests within its own enclosed sphere to admit members, to protect its members against particular contingencies, and to educate others so as to make them eligible for membership” (§ 252). By relying on the closure of boundaries and of exclusive membership, corporations and the administration of justice already introduce vertical levels of hierarchy into civil society, however cooperative they may be. For Hegel, then, the dynamism of modern societies requires two types of closure for cultural and social integration: the ethical legitimacy promoted by the boundaries of exclusive membership and the effectiveness that is possible only in a hierarchically organized and administered, bounded community. Without such boundaries, neither legitimacy nor effectiveness could be politically organized in the sense of a “self-relating organism,” and any political cosmopolitanism would necessarily fail to achieve both the effectiveness of a constitutional order that is based on the differentiation and unity of a politically organized and thus particular community. Hegel thinks that a modern society requires the political closure of a sovereign state, something that he takes political cosmopolitanism to reject.
In order to provide a contrast with the limits provided by the self-organization of civil society with the benefits of the distinctively political closure of the state, Hegel argues for the two classical types of sovereignty: internal and external, corresponding to forms of inneres and äusseres Staatsrecht in which the idea of freedom of a people is made actual (§ 259). This distinction would fail to hold if relations of interdependence required that they each presuppose the other: if internal sovereignty inevitably has an international dimension, for example, then modern societies do not have political closure for those aspects of political life subject to the processes of globalization. Political cosmopolitanism suggests that once we reject the distinction between internal and external sovereignty, then it is necessary to “unbundle” and thus to disaggregate many of the issues of sovereignty, bounded community, and citizenship.
Hegel certainly sees that internal and external sovereignty are both related in the completeness and closure of the whole. In rejecting the alternative of popular sovereignty, he argues that sovereignty resides in the state, not in the fiction of “the will of the people” or in the vagaries of public opinion; that is, it resides in the proper institutional and territorial organization of the state as a whole: “the peaceful state is that in which all branches of civil life subsist, while their collective and separate subsistence proceeds from the Idea of the whole” (§ 320). The control of the state is thus due to its organization, which disperses and unifies (rather than concentrates and centralizes) the traditional monopolies of power and decision making. This same collective organization that makes the state a unified individual with separate spheres with it also makes the state an independent individual in relation to other states. Since this independence is “the primary freedom and supreme dignity of a nation” (eines Volkes), citizens defend the state in its individuality, as a self-sufficient whole (§ 322).
As independent and complete, relations between states are governed by treaties, although these contracts are “infinitely less varied than it is in civil society, in which individuals are mutually interdependent in innumerable respects, whereas independent states are primarily wholes which can satisfy their own needs internally” (§ 332). It would certainly pose a difficulty for their internal sovereignty if states were no longer closed and self-sufficient wholes; similarly, external sovereignty would be undermined if states were not independent from international civil society and from the international society of states such that they incurred no obligations other than ones they imposed upon themselves. This interdependence is seen most fundamentally in the fact that states can no longer legitimately create rules for exclusive membership apart from international obligations. With the emergence of human rights for immigrants, refuges, and aliens, rights and benefits that once belonged solely to nationals extend to all residents and “are now extended to foreign populations, thereby undermining the very basis of national citizenship.”16 Given the fact of increasing global interdependence, these consequences make both the internal sovereignty of states and external sovereignty in society of states inherently unstable even apart from the forms of contingency that Hegel sees as inherent in the relations among states as individual wills.
For all his notorious celebration of war and the “honor” of states, Hegel was well aware that states could not maintain their own internal integrity as individuals if they did not limit their use of force. The mutual recognition of states for each other remains “even in war,” and Hegel requires that international law must at least preserve the possibility of peace, including the obligations to respect ambassadors and not to wage war “either on internal institutions and the peace of private and family life, or on private individuals” (§ 338). Such obligations are now reflected in international law as war crimes and crimes against humanity, which, after Nuremberg, “shock the conscience of the human community” and thus may be tried in criminal tribunals and courts. However much these obligations are in the enlightened self-interest of states, such restrictions entail an explicit analogy between the “peaceful” organization of the internal parts of the state and the obligations and mutual recognition governing external relations among states. As the history of European states shows, without such obligations and given the contingency of mutual recognition, the dominant strategy has been the constant preparation for war, leading to an increasing lack of peace in the internal organization of states. For example, not merely the dynamics of civil society and the preparation for war leads to the ceaseless expansion of industry and colonization, but also to the escalation in the executive powers of the state, removing many decisions from communal and legislative control. It is also true that war has proved not to be the only such problem: With illegal immigration and the trafficking of illegal goods by internationally organized crime, states are forced to escalate their internal police powers as well. In this way, a dialectic between the national and international levels of organization ensues, made increasingly more difficult to escape through the introduction of new forms of interdependence and mutual obligation, such as the exporting of harms, pollution, and other externalities across state boundaries.
This internal/external dialectic leads to a decidedly non-Hegelian conclusion. If international agreements are as “unstable” as Hegel believes, then so is the internal sovereignty of interdependent states. In reacting to increasing interdependence and the loss of control that follows from it, modern states have attempted to reestablish control in roughly one of two ways: the loss of closure escalates either extensive or intensive power (or both, as the cases of Napoleon and Bismarck might show).17 In the first instance, the executive functions of the state are given increased power and control, leaving its supervisory agencies with greater and greater decision-making power and authority exercised from above (and with much less accountability to the legitimate interests of the political community). This is the opposite of the intended result of the purely operational control of agents. As Hegel notes, after Napoleon the solution to the problem of closure is the executive division of labor, with “the result that everything is again controlled from above and that functions are, to use the common expression, centralized.” The benefits of centralization are for Hegel (as for Weber) a gain in organizational capacity, “with a high degree of facility, speed, and effectiveness in measures adopted for the universal interests of the state” (§ 290). Nonetheless, Hegel rightly seeks to limit this form of extensive power because it undermines cooperative hierarchy among lower level communal organizations. Communal organizations from below are the only available counterweight to such centralized and extensive power: “the proper strength of the state resides in its communities (Gemeinde)” They in fact provide the basis for legitimacy as opposed to the effectiveness of power: “Legitimate power is found only when the particular spheres are organized” (§ 290). As Weber points out, states have historically tended to replace the intensive power of communities with the extensive power of bureaucratic organizations. Second, states have also attempted to promote their own intensive power by strengthening the social bond and capacity to mobilize large-scale cooperation through nationalism, civil religion, and other means. When this social bond is strengthened as executive power is centralized, it begins to make the political community more exclusive and less responsive to the universal demands to respect all persons as such as its employment of centralized power in the interests of the state also limits the space for the exercise of subjective freedom.
This dialectic between internal and external sovereignty suggests that mechanisms for maintaining bounded political communities in conditions of interdependence are self-defeating. Even if Hegel provides us with good reasons for thinking that boundaries are ethically and politically significant for some purposes, his argument is insufficient to establish a decisive rejection of political cosmopolitanism. On the contrary, Hegel’s own rather Grotian treatment of international law suggests that even a community of sovereign states would have to be bound by enforceable legal obligations beyond their consent in treaties; without such limitation on coercive power, external sovereignty does not serve the goal of establishing the basis for a free people. Similarly, internal sovereignty cannot be maintained without external self-limitation at the international level, so that the attempt to maintain external boundaries may move the state from a cooperative hierarchy to one organized by escalating the extensive and intensive powers that make the state more effective. The accompanying loss in legitimacy makes the state no longer the primary location for the realization of modern freedom, especially the freedom of peoples from domination. The Westphalian system that Hegel endorses preserves the plurality of states through the anti-cosmopolitan insistence that there is not, nor should there ever be, a “praetor to adjudicate between states” (§ 333). The alternative, I argue, is not to create a Leviathan-like praetor or judge (as suggested by analogy to the solution proposed for the conflicts and injuries in Abstract Right). Rather, it lies in showing why the facts of global interdependence do not undermine the political community based on freedom and nondomination but provides the potential basis for an effective and legitimate cosmopolitan organization of the goods of membership and administration.
Hegel primarily sees international relations as a direct consequence of the bounded character of states as individuals; thus, the instability of international relations is a necessary consequence of the contingent relations among states as closed and complete individuals. Yet it is also true that for Hegel states depend in their individuality on the recognition of other states, to such an extent that states are not yet fully realized without it: “A state without relations to other states is as little an actual individual as an individual is an actual person without relations to other persons” (§ 331). Not only do such relations of mutuality entail an unavoidable international dimension to any state qua free, complete, closed, and self-relating social system, they also lead to the self-defeating dialectic of interdependence developed in the last section precisely to the extent that the state’s normative goal is the realization of freedom.
Several tendencies operating in globalized societies historically support this dialectic of interdependence. In this section, I briefly identify two such tendencies, each related to the primary goods of bounded community: the agency relations pervasive in the administration of complex societies and the shift of the source and legitimacy of rules of membership from the nation state to the international community.
Once the Westphalian system of formally equal sovereign states becomes less and less workable for global international society, states will be subject to increasing interdependence and new forms of nonstate authority. First, the expansion of horizontal relations of civil society has now increased to such an extent that many now speak of the “administrative failure” of the state, especially with regard to the global economy and new transnational harms like pollution and global warming.18 With this administrative failure of the state, a second failure of political authority emerges: Hegel simply could not anticipate a marked shift in political authority away from the state to civil society as politics increasingly becomes “deterritorialized” once administrative closure is no longer possible.19 As control by means of internal and external sovereignty proves inadequate, persistent regulatory failures have led states to systematically pursue policies of deregulation and denationalization of economic processes within their own territories.20 The result is that states have ceded significant control to authoritative institutions outside of the framework of states, so much so that we see a reversal in relations of supervision from the national to the transnational, from state to civil society. One consequence is the decreasing importance of national citizenship for accountability.
Even given these failures, it may turn out that Hegel’s insistence on politically organized community as the proper location for freedom may in a certain sense be right. The nation state is indeed historically the only form so far in which the public freedom of citizens has been historically realized in effective institutions. At the same time, the cultural resources that helped underwrite the legitimate use of force and coercion as the primary means to create and defend such territorial boundaries are now dissipating and being reconfigured. The nation state may also fail in yet another respect even more central to Hegel’s account. Due to globalization, it may no longer be the primary mechanism for the constitution and authorization of political authority; it increasingly fails, in Weber’s terms, to possess, exercise, and organize exclusive authority over its own territory and thus to use that authority to protect the liberty of citizens from subjection and domination due to external influences. Instead, existing forms of control resemble what Hegel calls “the administration of justice,” in that they provide self-governance from within global civil society, for and by global civil society, yet without the normative constraints of broad accountability and the political equality of equal citizenship.
Hegel’s own analysis of the administration of justice from within civil society suggests that these new types of hierarchical relationships in civil society have always been pervasive in modern economies organized around the firm as the unit of production.21 They are hierarchical and noncooperative because they are based on asymmetrical information: The principal delegates authority to the agent to act in his or her interests precisely because the principal does not possess the resources, information, or expertise necessary to perform the necessary tasks. Given that the principal may not be in a position to monitor and scrutinize agents even if given the opportunity, the division of epistemic labor creates pervasive asymmetries of competence and access to information. As Karl Llewellyn has already pointed out, self-government is thereby eroded to the degree that principals find that “it is repeatedly necessary to give agents powers wider than those they are normally expected to use.”22
Unlike many forms of the agent/principal relationship in economic life, the new global agents are acting in a more general regulatory capacity, regulating primarily the very political authorities for which they are agents. Moreover, the lack of any legal framework necessary to check private forms of international regulatory regimes accentuates the noncooperative, hierarchical features that the use of administrative agency by states imports from economic contexts. In these contexts, hierarchy may be defined as “the asymmetric and incompletely defined authority of one actor to direct the activities of another within certain bounds.”23 The challenge to political communities is precisely that such authority is “incompletely defined,” since it is precisely the incompleteness of the definition of authority that creates the absence of accountability. No longer are the agents accountable to states; rather, after denationalizing many aspects of market relations, states have become accountable to the financial markets and “nationally registered statistical agencies” that formulate specific standards used to rate loans to both governments and firms. There is a tendency toward the “reversal of control” from principal to agent and from the nation state to international civil society and, thus, to large, multinational corporations.24 If political community is the goal, then this reversal must be undone; it can be undone only with the minimal level of democratic control sufficient for a reversal of the direction of accountability. Simply renationalizing only recreates the initial uncertainty of authority. How can such reversal be avoided and authority made accountable? This is the practical imperative for any viable organizational form of political cosmopolitanism.
New forms of interdependence also point well beyond organizational and administrative aspects of the political life of nation states. Membership, too, is increasingly post-national. Central to any bounded political community is that its sovereignty provides the basis for it to determine its own rules of membership; justified by their own particular political goals or ethical norms, nations could in the past rely on territorialized identities and structures. Now with a dense set of international codes, laws, and treaties on human rights, states have in effect lost their capacity to define the rules and norms that define the scope and parameters of their own functioning. In the new order of sovereignty, “the larger system assumes the role of defining rules and principles, charging nation states with the responsibility to uphold them.”25 What is interesting here is not that international bodies serve to delegitimate how a state deals with foreigners or aliens, they also set out the parameters for how it may determine membership and the rights that it is obliged to protect both for its own citizens and for aliens. Rights have become increasingly a matter for residence, as many conventions and human rights regimes require eliminating any disparities between nationals and migrants and aliens, eliminating the effectiveness of exclusive political identities. Thus, even if states do now protect the rights of citizens and noncitizens, they do so because of the demands of legitimacy and the normative constraints of international rather than national laws and rules, as the former is now the location to specify and make explicit the scope and character of human rights left previously for national governments and their constitutions.
The effects of pervasive interdependence and the shift in authority and membership from the state to international civil society and political organizations provide practical arguments for a distinctively political cosmopolitanism, a form of politically organized life outside the boundaries and institutions of sovereign states. The cosmopolitan moral imperative to treat all others as human beings now extends not just to the groups that Hegel lists but now also to outsiders and aliens and thus to the relations between citizens and noncitizens. With the expansion of horizontal relationships in global civil society and the many transnational public spheres, the horizontal relation among citizens must be expanded as well. Since there are no social or cultural features of vertical or horizontal social relationships in local or national communities that cannot also now be found at the transnational level in some form or another, there is no easy way to mark the limits of modern community in terms of a shared ethical life (as Hegel recognizes with the idea of a Weltgeist with which he ends this section and begins the next on World History). Hegel may in this way accept a kind of convergent cultural cosmopolitanism for all his political anti-cosmopolitanism.26 But Weltgeist emerges as the “ultimate tribunal of world history” precisely because of the instability and inherent violence of the international system that Hegel postulates, leading him to accept a kind of political quietism in the face of the failures of the nation state system that he endorses. For this reason, the central argument of The Philosophy of Right fails: states may give a people dignity but they do not realize their freedom. The bounded universals of national political communities can only be legitimated by the transsubjective categories of world history, not by social freedom. Nor can the state solve the problems of fragmentation in the face of globalization.
As the location of political life shifts in an interdependent world to sites both inside and outside of borders, any particular political issue or problem can now be located inside as well as outside of any political community, thus always simultaneously operating at global and local levels at the same time. In other words, bounded communities are no longer viable as a space for the realization of freedom as the full implications of the dialectic between the national and the international issues in higher levels of political organization. The administrative failure of the state ought not be thought of primarily as the extension of Abstract Right; some argue that this legal deficit can be filled by establishing an international court of justice to adjudicate between states as legal parties.27 For political cosmopolitanism, on the contrary, international political organization is not a matter of re-creating the state and its judiciary on a larger scale but of finding the proper systematic institutional mechanisms for the rule of law and the accountability of authority among widely dispersed but interdependent groups and individuals. If it is to be useful in checking the authority of deterritorialized international civil society, it is also unavoidably going to limit the political authority of territorial states as well as checking both the extensive power of international civil society and the intensive power of states and subnational communities. Only another institutional authority can limit such authority: the authority of the politically organized community of world citizens. This appeal beyond politics to world spirit is a consequence of Hegel’s failure to see the instability of the nation state system as based on the inadequacies of political closure.
I cannot here propose a fully developed alternative conception of political cosmopolitanism,28 but rather will only suggest what such a conception could learn from äusseres Staatsrecht in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The problems it has to solve are not those of classical international law governing sovereign states but the global problems that escape state boundaries: administrative failure, the uncertainties of postnational political membership, and the emergence of new and “incompletely defined” relations of authority that are the new forms of administration of justice for a self-regulating civil society. All these problems point in the direction of the need for the democratic accountability of emerging global forms of administrative authority and to the unlinking of forms and dimensions of citizenship from membership and authority in a bounded community. Both require new formal and informal institutions, the nature of which cannot be deduced from any general moral principle of justice; rather, they derive from the new politics of democratic accountability in which citizens exercise their sovereignty inside and outside the boundaries of the state. The goal of this form of politics will be to create the conditions for world citizenship, a status that is required to provide the basis for a political counterbalance to the great inequalities that characterize global civil society and relations among sovereign states.
One of Hegel’s signal contributions in The Philosophy of Right was to recognize that civil society is self-governing, even if it is also in need of political governance. As Hegel suggests, cooperative hierarchy and exclusive membership already emerge in civil society as institutional means to protect freedom. The same process of governance without government also explains the high degree of order in supposedly anarchic international society, where governance takes the form of “international regimes.”29 If there is to be any political check on such regimes, then citizens must have some means for public input and accountability. This form of politics is deterritorialized to the extent that the interests of citizens have increasingly less to do with their location in communities organized by states, but with shared problems and common interests created by a lack of influence over the process of globalization itself.30 This process is currently informal and, hence, often grossly unequal, mostly involving attempts by groups in transnational civil society to contest aspects of global governance such as regime formation and compliance monitoring. Through such regimes, states are monitored by an increasing number of actors and open to an increasing influence of transnational civil society, as is the case in the human rights regime and its emerging legal institutions such as International Tribunals and possibly even an International Criminal Court. Such institutions could very well organize this kind of contestatory activity and become the means to exercise political influence over civil society and states. One example is the case of environmental crimes and responsibilities. They are increasingly made an international, rather than a national, affair where governments are as likely to cooperate with powerful economic actors in transnational civil society as with their own citizens. This form of politics requires that citizenship and sovereignty would have to be unbundled from both territoriality and bounded communities, as much as from a public sphere that is now less and less monolinguistic and mono-cultural.
Here we return to the dilemma of political cosmopolitanism with which we began. How might such a form of politics, democratic sovereignty, and citizenship be both effectively and legitimately organized? Even as universal suffrage and representative institutions have evolved in response to some of these very circumstances of pace and scale in the nation state, these great innovations now seem too closely connected to culturally and territorially bounded forms of political community. Representative democracy, it might be argued, better embodies popular sovereignty than contestation, insofar as it is mediated through the sovereignty of the state. Once legitimated by voting and constitutional constraints, such a democracy could seek stronger regulatory control than this informal model of accountability in regimes seems to allow. The difficulty here is not just that social facts make such control infeasible and democratically undesirable. Rather, such control would make the exercise of public power an exclusive good.31 Because reliance on an undefined majority does not permit anyone to exercise effective control over the outcome of public processes in a global and pluralist society, electoral representation does not produce legitimacy or a sense of effective participation in governance. As Hegel argues in the nation state context, the electorate gives up upon large-scale electoral processes over which they have little chance of real influence, and majority rule becomes rule by a few (§ 311). This creates constant problems of legitimacy and promotes narrowly strategic behavior prior to and during election periods. The second objection sees accountability as better dispersed through voting, especially in elections that are regular and follow the one person-one vote rule. Such popular control is, however, only retrospective and merely negative and reactive. This means that citizens’ capacity to reject leaders is stronger than their active power to shape any policy or obligations. It is hard to see what degree of control the electorate can exercise if voters are only able to influence public decisions exclusively “through retrospective judgment that representatives anticipate voters will make.”32 Such representation of a majority of individuals then fails to be a feasible mechanism of control under current conditions.
In contrast to majoritarian mechanisms, Hegel has proposed different forms of representation within the state that might also be applicable to periods of deliberation when regulatory regimes are contested within international society. These mechanisms of representation are group based, with the intention of assuring that various estates or social positions are present in processes of public deliberation about legislative decision making (§ 309). At the cosmopolitan level, it would be especially important to consider a social mode of representation that would admit nonstate actors into the decision making process according to nonterritorial principles of selection, especially as the interests of states diverge more and more from the interests of many of their citizens. Without this kind of representation in cosmopolitan deliberation that seeks to authorize collectively the rules and modes of regulation across the boundaries of communities, international society would remain too closely tied to states and only reflect their specific set of interests, however diverse these may be. Freed from the fictions of the voluntarism of majoritarian rule, such a mode of representation seeks to join diverse groups together with their interests and collective identities intact so that that each has the reasonable expectation of being able to shape collective deliberation. Just as in Hegel’s conception of parliamentary deliberation, such representation does not issue in a unified global will of the people, nor in each coming to recognize that they necessarily share a general interest that supersedes their particular group interests, but rather institutionalizes the joint activity of deliberating with others and mutually influencing them across various cultural and social boundaries.33
Since the public sphere cannot govern on its own, contestation alone is insufficient even if it is all that is feasible in the absence of democratically organized institutions that offer opportunities for deliberation and participation. Without reasons-responsive institutions, citizens can only hope to indirectly influence decisions by means of public strategic actions; this sort of activity is typical of transnational civil society, evident in human rights and environmental NGOs and other civil society organizations. Perhaps states could, as Thompson suggests, institute the office of a “tribune” to represent the interests of noncitizens.34 In order for wider accountability to be possible across the range of global administrative and membership decisions, a more strongly republican form of cosmopolitan citizenship subject to a number of further conditions must be realized. The most important is the emergence of a robust set of international institutions, especially an international judiciary with a legitimating function for states. If cosmopolitan institutions are democratic, then obligations incurred by participating in them will be constantly tested and revised by public deliberation. Such democratic activity should enhance rather than reduce national democracy. Indeed, citizen sovereignty functions in part as a principle favoring the pluralism of democratic forms of life. The very facts that make the contestation model attractive also tell against it as a model of cosmopolitan citizenship. Contestation alone tends toward a strategic orientation to such authority, leading to trade-offs among various group interests in exchange for continued cooperation and control. Thus, the emphasis on contestation in the current exercise of cosmopolitan citizenship is best viewed primarily as a corrective mechanism that can be employed when democratic authority has broken down and been reversed. Nondomination as an ideal requires that citizens directly participate in the terms of the constitution and operation of authority. This means that democratic accountability must have a directly deliberative component; that is, citizens must have effective deliberative input in the operational control of democratic regulatory institutions to the extent that they generate collectively binding obligations. The process of deliberation of sovereign citizens to whom institutions are responsive becomes collectively authoritative.
Besides such arguments from effectiveness, directly deliberative forms of cosmopolitan democracy are normatively superior in light of ideals of equal citizenship. In comparison, current arrangements are the worst of all possible worlds: they have the worst features of agency (unaccountability) and of the territorial state (uniform policies executed with little direct input). Given this combination of regulatory failures, such practices of agency are most likely to violate conditions of freedom as non-domination. The directness of deliberation allows citizens to participate in formulating cooperative conditions of agency that all can accept; it provides best for citizen sovereignty as the ability to demand an account from agents and other delegated forms of authority. Directness also permits the introduction of local variation through responsiveness to direct participation of a variety of citizens in shaping institutional rules and policies. Deliberativeness introduces features that are complementary to direct, local participation. It permits higher-order coordination and the diffusion of successful policies, as well as testing of the larger and often unintended impact of local decisions upon other locales and constituencies. More than merely legitimating and strategically influencing decisions after the fact, cosmopolitan citizens are free from the domination of agents only if they authorize and delimit hierarchy by their direct and deliberative participation in decisions that set the terms of their shared obligations.
To the extent that some set of cosmopolitan institutions become deliberative enough to make authorization possible, the disaggregated sovereignty of the nation state in large part falls upon the capacities of the cosmopolitan citizen and the existing form of organization in transnational public spheres and civil society. If this sovereignty is denationalized along with citizenship and democratic activities, then the fault lines of conflict may also change so that they no longer coalesce around national cultures and their struggles for political self-determination. This may mean that democracy is no longer tied so directly to cultural ties but rather to voluntary and chosen forms of solidarity, especially as new citizens no longer choose to assimilate to pre-political national cultures as they come to embrace democratic legal and political forms. Liberal nationalists are certainly right when they reject the kind of issuebased solidarities of NGOs as an insufficient form of identification. Nonetheless, such chosen forms of solidarity recognize a shared fate in the face of the breakdown of many older forms of solidarity and the dangers of new ones. Under modern global social conditions, citizenship itself was an innovative form of identity that more or less coincided with the process of nation building and was finally given universalist form in democracies. What might extend this process of inclusion in new ways?
To answer this question, we might look at the emergence of forms of solidarity in democracies that are antecedent on national identities. Here we can look to social movements (such as the Civil Rights Movement) that sought to extend national political cultures beyond their narrow and pre-political basis. Or we might consider the post-colonial movements that rejected the arbitrary authority of nondemocratic administrators. Indeed, international law widely recognizes the right to resist tyranny and slavery.35 In such cases, achieving freedom from arbitrary authority requires advancing the freedom of those all who are vulnerable in a similar way.36 In the case of globalization, it is vulnerability to the arbitrary authority of agents who are not accountable to citizens and to the power of those institutions that are not responsive to their reasons. Such a tyranny is overcome only by the self-creation and exercise of world citizenship by world citizens, first through contestation and challenge and then by the directly deliberative authorization of binding collective decisions. When distributed as widely as new forms of sovereignty, citizenship becomes differentiated and more complex in the face of the realities of global interaction. The universalist core of cosmopolitanism remains to the extent that citizenship rights belong to all as free and equal persons; it is extended because they are free and equal in all their particularity and vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities now take the form of being subject to the unconstrained judgments of incompletely defined authorities or narrow state interests. Transforming these effects of globalization is thus the task of cosmopolitan citizens whose self-governance expresses the ideal of freedom as nondomination. Such freedom is possible only if adequate institutions politically organize and maintain such freedom and are responsive to the reasons that emerge in deliberation and contestation.
Hegel’s anti-cosmopolitanism is in part motivated by his diagnosis of the lack of integration of modern society. A distinctly modern form of differentiated and mediated bounded political community is able to respond to the social fragmentation of spatially and temporally extended modern societies by strengthening its internal unity and external boundaries. Those who today rightly worry about the demise of territorial community seek to defend the rights of communities to opt out of international civil society, especially for those groups such as indigenous peoples whose participation in current international institutions is particularly subject to disadvantages in access to influence. This is an important and legitimate concern, especially in light of the pervasive new forms of hierarchical authority from above that establish political obligations without public deliberation or contestation. If the de jure sovereignty and de facto independence of liberal nation states are now substantially weakened and replaced by new forms of political authority and hierarchies, then it would seem that without such citizenship many areas of social life that affect us most would be entirely out of the domain of democratic control. It is then with good reason that many now wonder about the possibility of a “neofeudalism” of multiple sources of authority and cross-cutting loyalties. Such a neofeudal order would be nondemocratic, to the extent that it results in differentiated sovereignty without differentiated citizenship.37 Cosmopolitan citizenship establishes the latter to limit the hierarchies of the former: it establishes a voice for the processes of globalization from which there is currently no feasible exit. Rather than the putative “limits of affiliation” based on cultural identities, this lack of exit is a new limit on modern political community. Where exit is not possible or extremely costly, then effective voice in contestation and deliberation is the only alternative. Political cosmopolitanism suggests that this situation requires new institutional remedies and new opportunities for citizenship at the cosmopolitan level in order that there be collective forms of accountability and authorization. This form of cosmopolitan political organization would best fulfill the goal that Hegel sets for himself in The Philosophy of Right: the construction of the framework for a political community and its legitimate exercise of bounded power in order to realize the potentials for modern freedom in complex and pluralist societies.
An interesting parallel to such a political cosmopolitanism may be found in Hegel’s own contrast between the modern corporation and “the miserable guild system.” Corporations, or the associative side of civil society, were abolished with the emergence of modern social organization, “leaving it to individuals to look after themselves.” In order that distinctly modern corporations or ethical associations would not be “an enclosed guild” or a mere interest group, Hegel demands that they be subject to the political supervision of the state. We might similarly today worry about the return to “the miserable states system,” in which each state attempts to become an enclosed system and leave the worst off in international society to fend for themselves. Already Hegel saw that the need for bureaucracy in modern states meant that “citizens only have a limited share in the universal activity of the state; but it is necessary to provide ethical human beings with a universal activity in addition to their private ends.” For the universal activity not found in the state, Hegel looked to the corporation; so long as associative membership was placed in an organized whole it could become the “knowing and thinking part of ethical life” (§ 254). Now we may say the same thing about the international institutions in which citizens engage in the universal activity of shared governance outside the borders of the nation state.
Hegel’s discussion of centralization and decentralization in modern political organization provides yet another clue for thinking about the institutional structure appropriate to modern political cosmopolitanism. Hegel sees feudal and modern political organization as committing complementary errors. While the problem of the modern state is that power has been organized from above, communities organized from below “gained too great a degree of self-sufficiency, when they became states within the state and behaved in an obdurate manner like independently established bodies” (§ 290). This is very much the problem of a neofeudal order of the current system of states in which states subvert universal interests and undermine the legitimate interests of local communities for environmental and economic integrity. A political cosmopolitan order from above might become similarly Napoleonic and thus lack the communal basis for the exercise of legitimate power, however much its principles are based on widely recognized universal human rights. Indeed, such a lack of legitimate power plagues many current international organizations, in part because of the lack of a just distribution of basic political rights and effective opportunities for influence.
This organizational problem does not deny the need for the supervision of states and self-governing civil society by international judicial or parliamentary bodies. Nonetheless, the great advantage of the current cosmopolitan political order is that there are already very many fully developed organizations “from below” in modern states, international regimes and transnational civil society, all of which constitute what Hegel calls “circles in which particular and universal interests come together” (§ 290). In a multileveled and federal system of such institutions in a cosmopolitan democracy, the universal activity of citizenship is distributed across organizations and forms of integration. Cosmopolitan citizenship will thus take place in many different locations and in different ways within them: in national and international civil society and in contestation in national and international public spheres, in the limited share of universal activity still possible in nation states, and in citizens’ shared public deliberation across boundaries and access to influence over the governing cosmopolitan institutions. This not only permits different scales of organization but also a division of institutional and deliberative labor that is unavoidable in international society. Political cosmopolitanism then argues that such a dispersal of functions permits the international community to distribute important rights of exit and voice more fairly than in the current system for organizing legitimacy and effectiveness.
Such a form of political cosmopolitanism at least potentially solves the dilemma posed in the beginning, in that its effectiveness is based on collectively authorized and legitimate power responsive to a variety of reasons. Of course, only with the emergence of genuinely political international institutions that are accountable to world citizens would the dilemma actually be solved. My purpose here is only to show that political cosmopolitanism is not trapped between two undesirable alternatives and thus to answer some of the strongest objections to its very possibility posed by Hegel and others. Such a form of cosmopolitanism remains an incomplete project and even more so if we add distinctly democratic requirements. The current capacity of human rights regimes to define the rules and limits of state legality as well as the increasing expansion of global social interaction in civil society and public spheres beyond elites provides some reason for optimism. Recent protests and demands for accountability of international institutions and agencies have had some success in bringing about internal changes in previously closed institutions, as evidenced in debt relief and some increasing openness even in economic institutions such as the World Bank and the WTO to political influence and participation that is not cast in the terms of standard economic models. At the same time, the continued exclusion from effective participation and the continued exportation of costs and externalities to the worst off members of international society is strong evidence to the contrary that access to political influence over the social and economic processes unleashed by globalization is still difficult to achieve in the absence of something like a democratic rule of law and social, cultural, and civil rights for many governing transnational and international settings and organizations. Such previously excluded members would participate only if they have motivation to cooperate: not only must international political organizations equally and fairly distribute the goods of membership and administration to all, they must provide clear channels of influence and transparent mechanisms of accountability that make for political equality and the equal worth of political freedom across the great asymmetries that characterize the current distribution of power in international society.
The emergence of such a democratic politics and rule of law at the international level must be a two-sided process, from above and below, if the political goods of membership and administration are to be subjected to the normative constraints of democracy and distributive fairness. Given the current limits of modern political community, political integration requires not only a robust democratic state whose international orientation is based on the acceptance of its own limited de jure sovereignty but also a differentiated, mediated, and politically organized world community in which cosmopolitan citizens together exercise their own and maintain each other’s freedom in many different acts and sites of contestation and deliberation.38
1 David Held distinguishes three main positions on globalization: hyperglobalists, transformationalists, and skeptics. Hyperglobalists see globalization as bringing about denationalization and the creation of a single world market that will eventually supplant traditional nation states as the primary unit of a world society. Skeptics deny this view, arguing for the enduring power of the nation state. Transformationalists see current globalization as unprecedented, leading to a basic transformation of existing institutions and the emergence of new ones as well. The nation state may retain its supremacy over its own territory but will be “juxtaposed, to varying degrees with the expanding jurisdiction of institutions of international governance and the constraints of, as well as the obligations derived from, international law.” See David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 8 ff. My analysis here requires the empirical adequacy of the transformationalist thesis, supported in great detail by Held et al. in the various phenomena that underlie globalization from trade to immigration to culture and information technology. Any defense of Hegel’s conception of internal and external sovereignty would ultimately accept the skeptical thesis, given that Hegel accepts the completeness of the state and the possibility of its effective closure despite strong tendencies to the contrary.
2 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), § 209. Hereafter all citations in text by the common section number.
3 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 36. The wider issue is Rawls’s claim to justify his commitment to the state as a territorial political community and to “the law of peoples” because of putative “limits of affiliation.” This objection aims at the republican rather than the liberal component of cosmopolitan democracy; a brief reply is that these limits of solidarity are surely plastic in pluralistic polities like the contemporary United States. There is no empirical feature of the associative bond among citizens in a large and pluralistic nation state such as the United States that is not also present in transnational social interaction or institutional settings. Richard Miller thinks that certain characteristics of communal social relations justify the priority of patriotic concern universally; specifically, he appeals to “unchosen” and “especially intense interdependence and mutual subordination.” However, it is empirically false that such relations are unique to bounded political communities. See Richard Miller, “Cosmopolitan Respect and Patriotic Concern,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 27 (1998): 202–224. I see little hope that this argumentative strategy will work given the fact of pervasive global interdependence at many different levels of social interaction.
4 See Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) also Phillip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); for its extension and application to cosmopolitan contexts, see James Bohman, “Cosmopolitan Republicanism,” The Monist 84 (2001): 3–22.
5 For such democratically motivated criticisms, see Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) and David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 64–65.
6 Amy Gutmann, “The Challenge of Multiculturalism in Political Ethics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993): 171–206; Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) and Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
7 Dennis Thompson, “Democratic Theory and Global Society,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 7 (1999): 113.
8 Daniel Bell, “The World and the United States in 2013,” Daedulus 116 (1987): 1–31.
9 Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 83–84.
10 Charles Beitz, “Social and Cosmopolitan Liberalism,” International Affairs 75 (1999): 519.
11 Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 41. For a criticism of this assumption with regard to the Kantian duties of hospitality in global immigration, see Seyla Benhabib, “Citizens, Residents and Aliens in a Changing World: Political Membership in the Global Era,” Social Research 66 (1999): 726 ff.
12 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 39.
13 Adriaan Peperzak, “Hegel Contra Hegel in The Philosophy of Right: The Contradictions of International Politics,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 32 (1994): 247.
14 See Lawrence Friedman, The Horizontal Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) for an analysis of the expansion of horizontal social relationships as an essential feature of modernity.
15 Michael Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 205 ff.
16 Yasemin Soysal, The Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 137.
17 On the distinction between extensive and intensive power, see Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5 f. Extensive power “refers to the ability to organize large numbers of people over far-flung territories in order to engage in minimally stable cooperation.” By contrast, intensive power “refers to the ability to organize tightly and command a high level of mobilization or commitment from the participants, whether the area and numbers covered is great or small” (5).
18 Jürgen Habermas, Die Postnationale Konstellation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999), 141.
19 Saskia Sassen, Losing Control: Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
20 Sassen, Losing Control, 15–16.
21 Kenneth Arrow, “The Economics of Agency,” in Principals and Agents, ed. J. Pratt and R. Zeckhauser (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1985), 37.
22 Karl Llewellyn, “Agency,” in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Volume 1 (New York: MacMillan, 1930), 483.
23 Gary Miller, Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 16.
24 Llewellyn, “Agency,” 484; Harrison White, “Agency as Control,” in Principal and Agents, ed. J. Pratt and R. Zeckhauser (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1985), 205.
25 See Soysal, The Limits of Citizenship, 144.
26 It may be useful to distinguish more dimensions of cosmopolitanism than merely the moral and political ones explicitly present in Hegel and most contemporary debates. See Pauline Kleingeld, “Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth Century Germany,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1999): 505–524. Certainly today hyperglobalists are usually economic and cultural cosmopolitans, while not necessarily moral, political, or legal cosmopolitans. Kleingeld also adds the Romantic cosmopolitanism of Schlegel and Novalis based on an affective form of global community quite opposed to the economic or commercial globalization of the market.
27 Peperzak proposes that for the sake of consistency Hegel ought to repeat his earlier solution to the problem of abstract right on the international level; see Peperzak, “Hegel Contra Hegel in The Philosophy of Right,” 249. Such a repetition of state structures would lead not only to moral conflicts but also to the need to rank cosmopolitan obligations as intrinsically superior to national and local ones. Such a hierarchy thus leads to a moral rather than a political cosmopolitanism.
28 This is the goal of my book, Democracy Outside of Borders (forthcoming).
29 Regimes are “sets of implicit and explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area in international relations.” These include agreements as diverse as human rights, commercial whaling, or arms reduction. See Stephen Krasner, “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables,” in International Regimes, ed. S. Krasner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 2.
30 On the role of regimes as agreements on rules and systems of monitoring necessary to solve specific problems, see James Bohman, “International Regimes and Democratic Governance,” International Affairs 75 (1999): 499–514.
31 For a view of democracy that endorses this consequence, see Thomas Christiano, The Rule of the Many (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).
32 Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 179.
33 See Andrew Buchwalter, “Political Pluralism in Hegel and Rawls,” in Pragmatism and Critical Theory, ed. J. Bohman and W. Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming). Buchwalter emphasizes that Hegel understands deliberation as Mitwirkung, or the mutual influence of diverse communities in decisions that affect them, rather than as the formation of some unified will. Against Buchwalter’s expansive interpretation, Hegel clearly limits the decision-making and authorizing role of this body in The Philosophy of Right (309), even as it is a location for the expression of legitimate interests and for mutual influence and consultation.
34 Thompson, “Democratic Theory and Global Society,” 122.
35 On this right as a basic human right derived from rights of self-determination, see Fernado Teson, A Philosophy of International Law (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 6.
36 Pettit, Republicanism, 144–145. Unlike civic republicanism, Pettit’s form of republicanism does not rule out extending the ideal outside the nation state, arguing that a republic has the obligation to “improve the prospects for nondomination on the international front” (151). Furthermore, he argues, a republican defense policy and the interests of a republican state encourages “different layers of multinational cooperation and institutionalization,” even possibly an “expatriate domestic sovereignty” in cases where international agencies “would do better in the promotion of freedom as non-domination among citizens of that state than the state itself” (152–153). While still formulated from the perspective of the defense of nation state, this principle justifies cosmopolitan political institutions and the rejection of state sovereignty when they are necessary to realize freedom.
37 Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: McMillan, 1977), 254
38 I would like to thank Chris Latiolais for his comments; they helped me see several issues more clearly. I would also like to thank Robert Bernasconi, Jay Bernstein, and Robert Pippin for their comments on feasibility and on the perspective of those currently excluded from international politics. I would also like to thank Simon Lumsden for his discussion of the central place of demands for democratic accountability at recent WTO and World Bank protests.