10

The Cosmopolitan Idea and National Sovereignty

ROBERT J. C. YOUNG

What is the relation of the cosmopolitan idea to national sovereignty? The connection between them goes back at least two centuries, but it has been changing as the links between them have mutated under the pressure of the politics of different times. Historically, the cosmopolitan idea was originally an idea directed against the idea of the nation and its claims for sovereignty. The first formulations in this arena were largely German, made in a dramatic counterspirit against French nationalism before the nation-state of Germany was created. Goethe, Kant, Heine, Schiller—all affirmed their loyalty to the cosmopolitan idea of a universal humanity rather than a national identity. In an ironic twist, a unified Germany then subsequently developed instead the most extreme form of nationalism, in the course of which the term “cosmopolitan” was downgraded from its original meaning of belonging to the society of humanity to being widely used to designate the undesirable enemies of the state, rootless aliens, particularly communists and Jews. The cosmopolitan was transformed into the inmate of the camp.

The decline of the prestige of European political concepts in the aftermath of fascism provided the context for Hannah Arendt’s comment on what she characterized as “the bankruptcy of the nation state and its concept of sovereignty.”1 Sovereignty, which Arendt associated with “the claim to unchecked and unlimited power in foreign affairs,” legitimates a state violence, uncontrolled and uncontained by law, that eventually turns inward.2 In this situation, the concept of cosmopolitanism has been reversed back into a positive term, offering a new international perspective and order that could establish legal and ethical standards for a world in which the sovereign state, the guarantor of the rights of the citizen, is seen to have failed. Cosmopolitanism offers a new form of internationalism: in the nineteenth century, nationalism had been opposed by the internationalism of Marx and socialism, which had spoken for, without being able to ensure, the rights and welfare of the international working class, who were frequently more subjects than citizens, with few guarantees of rights of any kind. The new cosmopolitanism anticipated by Arendt no longer operates in a binary opposition with nationalism, nor with the complementary emotion of patriotism.

The shift has taken place not merely because the system of nation-states is by definition already international—you cannot have a nation without other nations—but also because, as Seyla Benhabib has argued, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1946 signaled a profound transformation of the concept of the international itself. The rights and sovereignty of nations, established through international treaties and so on, were shifted to the rights and claims of individuals: “This is the uniqueness of the many human rights agreements signed since World War II. They signal an eventual transition from a model of international law based on treaties among states to cosmopolitan law understood as international public law that binds and bends the will of sovereign nations.”3

This profound transformation facilitated the development of a new cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism—with its claims for universal human rights, including the rights of those who legally have no state to guarantee such rights, such as stateless refugees, migrants, child soldiers, or women and children ensnared in human trafficking—does not so much operate in opposition to ideas of national sovereignty but has transformed the status of sovereignty itself, so that the sovereign state (and any of its officers), instead of being the guarantor of rights, becomes answerable morally and in international law to the universal rights of humans. Cosmopolitanism, we might say, names a new form and practice of mediation, between the sovereignty of the state and the claims of the universal, between nation and individual, between the sovereign state and the ethics of human hospitality.

Is it possible to formulate a “transnational” or, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, “vernacular” cosmopolitanism that can reconcile the competing and often conflictual claims that cosmopolitanism attempts to mediate today? In this context, cosmopolitanism has become less a contemporary idea that needs to be defined than an idea that encapsulates a series of questions that may or may not have an answer. Here, in no particular order, are just five of them:

1. How can the relation of the universal claims of cosmopolitanism to human values be mediated with the internal workings of the state, particularly in democracies? How can the universal claims of cosmopolitanism be mediated with the still autonomous rights of local democracy and with the disjunctive experiences of marginalized or minority communities—differences that may require us to rethink the form of the universal itself? One thinks in this respect of Anthony Appiah’s argument that for the most part, the problem is not that one part of the world is claiming as universal something that another part of the world sees as alien, because in fact most ethical concepts claimed as universal such as “justice” or “hospitality,” would be acknowledged by all.4 In that sense, relativists fail to recognize that universals do exist. The problem is less their existence as universals than the fact that their interpretation, and hence their implementation, differs, as in the idea of justice, or, we might add, even democracy and freedom. Everyone more or less agrees on the idea of justice and a just world, but the problem, as Amartya Sen has pointed out, is that different people or societies inevitably have different ideas of justice.5 How can we reconcile them, or establish a conversation that may begin to mediate if not resolve their differences?
2. Whereas the coalescence of nation and state meant the consolidation of citizenship with forms of ethnic or cultural belonging, the identification for individuals and groups of the one with the other, cosmopolitanism raises the question of how new forms of belonging in a world marked by migration, diaspora, and transnational labor might be understood in relation to those older forms of singular cultural identification. Nationalism’s now largely abandoned utopia (or perhaps rather dystopia) of a homogeneous nation has allowed the articulation of different forms of identification that more resemble a Venn diagram with overlapping constituencies, some of which may fall inside the state, some outside, others in its hitherto unacknowledged peripheries. This situation is particularly true for minorities who are the product of relatively recent immigration; their identifications are not a matter of choosing between identifications but of having multiple, simultaneous identifications.
       In times past, such overlapping loyalties were considered a threat to the state: for example, loyalty to Rome among Catholics in early nineteenth-century Britain was regarded as a menacing disavowal of loyalty to the nation. In the modality of nationalism, you either identified with your nation or you did not, as in the British politician Lord Tebbit’s famous test for national belonging formulated more recently in the Thatcher era: which cricket team do you support—England, India, or Pakistan? But the modality of minoritarian status in today’s nation is that you do not have to choose between your nation and your cricket team—you can identify with both, a new kind of relation that we live every day and that governs our diasporic identities. Can the cosmopolitan idea enable a new theorization of the relation of the sovereign state to forms of transnational identification, a move that will involve breaking down the inside-outside dichotomy on which the nation-state is predicated and on which many of its policies are formulated? Can the sovereign state find modes of inclusivity for those legal or illegal aliens within its borders, whose lives are lived within its polity and on whose labor the polity often depends?
3. German sociologist Ulrich Beck has argued that the difference between Kant’s cosmopolitan idea of 1784 and that of today is that the cosmopolitan is no longer an idea; indeed, Beck would deny the validity of the title of this essay.6 He argues that both at the level of human rights treaties and the international institutions that attempt to enforce them, and at other levels of what he calls banal cosmopolitanism, the cosmopolitanism in which we live every day as a result of the international forces of globalization, cosmopolitanism has today become materialized and institutionalized. It is no longer merely an idea. For instance we could think of NYU Abu Dhabi in this sense as a typical phenomenon of our cosmopolitan era. As both an independent university in the Middle East and at the same time an integral part of New York University, its structure also characterizes what Beck, heavily influenced by the writings of Homi K. Bhabha, calls the “both/and” structure of cosmopolitanism, which replaces the “either/or” structure of nationalism.7
       Cosmopolitanism has become materially realized at the level of what in postcolonial theory we call the subaltern, the often invisible people at the bottom of society. In this context, we should acknowledge the other cosmopolitanism of Abu Dhabi: the vast pool of migrant workers and laborers from the Middle East and South Asia who are actually building NYU Abu Dhabi and who embody a very different version of the cosmopolitan experience. What is the relation of such cosmopolitans to the sovereign state in which they work, without the rights of citizenship? How can our academic disciplines, many of which are predicated on the form and boundaries of the nation-state, reconceptualize their objects of knowledge so as to take account of the changing human and material formations of the world that no longer correspond to national borders?
4. The reach of cosmopolitanism forces us to ask how we should formulate the relation of the sovereign state to the ethos of humanitarian intervention, where issues of human rights, or of genocide, legitimate intervention from outside. Will it be taken, as now seems to be the practice, as a case-by-case issue, according to the political pressures of the day? Somalia, yes, Rwanda, no. Is it possible to formulate more cogent and ethical rules for such situations?
       Without such a framework in place, the danger has been that humanitarian cosmopolitanism has become a means of political and military intervention against a sovereign state when it suits the powers that have the power to intervene, whether in the name of destroying claimed weapons of mass destruction, or allegedly saving Muslim women from the burqa—but then, as a result, subjecting them, their children, and their families to the destructions of ongoing war. What, we might ask simply, are the politics of humanitarian cosmopolitanism in relation to national sovereignty? What do we make of the masculinist discourse that often seems to be at play in such discourses of cosmopolitanism that speak in the name of humanity?
5. How far has the cosmopolitan idea also reached out to include the new global social movements that have enabled the rise of new forms of politics, such as the global ecology movements, transnational women’s movements, religious movements, or those of indigenous peoples who have utilized the possibility of transnational organizations and technology to articulate their claims with other comparable groups against their own individual sovereign states? To the extent that such activism could be seen to embody the continuing legacy of the anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century, what is the relation of the cosmopolitan idea to an older Left internationalism?
       The questions that the relation of the cosmopolitan idea to sovereignty pose require us to broach many of the most fundamental political issues of our time. One further insistent question remains: how can we translate the cosmopolitan idea into a transformative reality?

NOTES

  1  Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando: Harcourt, 1970), 6.

  2  Ibid., 5.

  3  Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 16.

  4  Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

  5  Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).

  6  Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 2006).

  7  Ibid., 57.