By what set of institutional arrangements might all the inhabitants of planet earth hope to negotiate, preferably in a peaceful manner, their common occupancy of a finite globe? This was the question that animated Kant’s cosmopolitan quest. If the question was prescient in 1800, when the global population was no more than 1 billion, then it is, surely, compelling today when the global population stands at 6.2 billion and rising. The benefits to be had and life-chances derived from open trade and commerce would be seriously curtailed, Kant held, unless merchants entering foreign lands were accorded the right to hospitality. The proliferation of trading relations should lead people to forego violent conflict and to seek out peaceable means to settle their differences. The vast increase in trade since Kant’s time would seem to make some form of cosmopolitanism inevitable. What Kant missed, as P. Cheah points out, was “the potential of popular nationalism as an emancipatory force” in relation to the then prevailing systems of absolutist state and imperial rule. Kant did not “predict that the material interconnectedness brought about by capitalism would engender the bounded political community of the nation.”1 This was so even though Kant pioneered the theory of national character and the idea of national belonging through common bloodlines of descent. Kant also accepted without question the boundedness of a sovereign territorial state in absolute space that could then be conceptualized as a “virtual individual” within the interstate system. Kant’s student, Herder, sought a radically different anthropology that focused on the binding force of cultural and political solidarities constructed in place. He understood, in ways that Kant did not, how place and place-bound loyalties (as articulated by Burke and later by Heidegger) could dominate over the universality of abstract absolute space (of the sort that was put to use in the mapping of India).2 The rise of nationalism (based, as Kant should have realized, in the construction of national character) and its increasing connectivity to class and state power throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries effectively blocked any embrace of cosmopolitanism, with all manner of destructive consequences. After Kant, cosmopolitanism largely lay dormant as a subterranean challenge either to the ethics of a powerfully present competitive liberalism with all its class connotations or to a pervasive nation-state politics grounded in nationalism and class power.
Cosmopolitanism has now reemerged from the shadows and shaken off many of its negative connotations (from times when Jews, communists, and cosmopolitans were cast as traitors to national solidarities and at best vilified and at worst sent to concentration camps). Challenges mounted to the sovereign powers of the state (by, for example, the formation of the European Union and neoliberalization) and to the coherence of the idea of the nation and the state (through massive cross-border capital flows, migratory movements, and cultural exchanges) have opened a space for an active revival of cosmopolitanism as a way of approaching global political-economic, cultural, environmental, and legal questions. Influential thinkers, such as Nussbaum, Habermas, Derrida, Held, Kristeva, Beck, Appiah, Brennan, Robbins, Clifford, and many others, have written persuasively on the topic in recent years.
Unfortunately, cosmopolitanism has been reconstructed from such a variety of standpoints as to often confuse rather than clarify political-economic and cultural-scientific agendas. It has acquired so many nuances and meanings as to make it impossible to identify any central current of thinking and theorizing, apart from a generalized opposition to the supposed parochialisms that derive from extreme allegiances to nation, race, ethnicity, and religious identity. Some broad-brush divisions of opinion do stand out. There are, as usual, the differences that arise from within the academic division of labor, such that philosophers (concerned mainly with moral imperatives and normative principles), literary and cultural theorists (concerned with cultural hybridities and critiques of multiculturalism), and social scientists (focusing on the international rule of law and systems of global governance) all take their particular cuts at what might be meant by the resurrected term. As so often happens within the academy, these different traditions rarely communicate. Passing strange that so many committed cosmopolitans avoid conversing with each other!
Martha Nussbaum, for example, constructs a moral cosmopolitan vision in opposition to local loyalties in general and nationalism in particular. Inspired by the Stoics and Kant, she presents cosmopolitanism as an ethos, “a habit of mind,” a set of loyalties to humanity as a whole, to be inculcated through a distinctive educational program (including unspecified revisions to geographical, anthropological, and ecological curricula) emphasizing the commonalities and responsibilities of global citizenship. Against this universal vision are ranged all manner of hyphenated versions of cosmopolitanism, variously described as “rooted,” “situated,” “actually existing,” “discrepant,” “vernacular,” “Christian,” “bourgeois,” “liberal,” “postcolonial,” “feminist,” “proletarian,” “subaltern,” “ecological,” “socialist”, and so forth. Cosmopolitanism here gets particularized and pluralized in the belief that detached loyalty to the abstract category of “the human” is incapable in theory, let alone in practice, of providing any kind of political purchase on the strong currents of globalization and international interventionism that swirl around us. Some of these “counter-cosmopolitanisms” were formulated in reaction to Nussbaum’s claims.3 She was accused, for example, of merely articulating an appropriate ideology for the “global village” of the neoliberal international managerial/ capitalist class. The famous line in the Communist Manifesto—“the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country”—could all too easily be used against her.4 In this we hear echoes of Antonio Gramsci’s critical consideration of cosmopolitanism as “a culturally conditioned, disastrous detachment, which is specifically linked to imperialism, the false universal ecumenicism of the Catholic Church, and the development of a rootless, intellectualized, managerial class.” The optimistic cosmopolitanism that became so fashionable following the Cold War, Craig Calhoun points out, not only bore all the marks of its history as “a project of empires, of long-distance trade, and of cities,” it also shaped up as an elite project reflecting “the class consciousness of frequent travelers.” As such, it more and more appeared as “the latest effort to revive liberalism” in an era of neoliberal capitalism. It is all too easy, concurs Saskia Sassen, “to equate the globalism of the transnational professional and executive class with cosmopolitanism.” Even worse, as R. Wilson points out, is the habit in these postmodern times of packing into the term “not only the voluntary adventures of liberal self-invention and global travel, but also those less benignly configured mixtures of migration, nomadism, diaspora, tourism, and refugee flight,” as well as the “traumas of the ‘immigrant as global cosmopolitan,’ carrier of some liberal and liberated hybridity, which, of course, the United States represents to the world as capitalist vanguard.”5
There is, in any case, something oppressive about the ethereal and abstracted universalism that typically lies at the heart of any purely moral discourse. How can cosmopolitanism account for, let alone be sympathetic to, a world characterized by class divisions, multicultural diversity, movements for national or ethnic liberation, multiple forms of identity politics, and all manner of other anthropological, ecological, and geographical differences? How can it be vigilantly attentive to otherness, cope with what Mehta calls “unfamiliarity,” and be sensitive to deeply etched cultural differences and geographical particularities? And why, some influential theorists ask, should the idea of nation and of state be cast so resolutely in opposition to cosmopolitanism when it takes a collectivity of states (Kant’s federation of independent republics) to actually produce and police any genuinely cosmopolitan global order? What Cheah and Robbins call “cosmopolitics” then emerges as a quest “to introduce intellectual order and accountability into this newly dynamic space” of cosmopolitan argument, within which “no adequately discriminating lexicon has had time to develop.”6
One strong current of opinion now holds, however, that a material basis for cosmopolitanism has already been constructed and that all that is lacking is an adequate theory to match these realities. There is surprisingly widespread acceptance of this view among cultural theorists as well as among social scientists impressed by the global integration of financial, production, and consumption networks and the mass migrations that have produced so many diasporas and so much cultural and ethnic mixing. It is generally accepted that the nation-state is no longer a sufficiently robust concept upon which to base analyses and that a new theoretical architecture is needed to deal with the new situation. A serious question then arises: is the new theory supposed merely to reflect or to critically engage with (and hopefully transform) the actualities of current practices? Contemporary cosmopolitanism often fuses the two approaches. In some cases this intermingling is productive, since it enables us to see how, say, transformations in international law that have occurred under pressures of neoliberalization since the 1970s have opened up new avenues for internationalist political critique while simultaneously reinforcing dominant class interests. The danger, however, is that seemingly radical critiques (as in the field of human rights) covertly support further neoliberalization and enhanced class domination.
This dilemma pervades the work of the sociologist Ulrich Beck. He argues that cosmopolitanization already exists, intensifying markedly since the 1990s. It has been
stimulated by the postmodern mix of boundaries between cultures and identities, accelerated by the dynamics of capital and consumption, empowered by capitalism undermining national borders, excited by the global audience of transnational social movements, and guided and encouraged by the evidence of world-wide communication (often just another word for misunderstanding) on central themes such as science, law, art, fashion, entertainment, and not least, politics. World-wide perception and debate of global ecological danger or global risks of a technological and economic nature (‘Frankenstein food’) have laid open the cosmopolitan significance of fear. And if we needed any proof that even genocide and the horrors of war now have a cosmopolitan aspect, this was provided by the Kosovo War in spring 1999 when NATO bombed Serbia in order to enforce the implementation of human rights.7
All of this “urgently demands a new standpoint, the cosmopolitan outlook, from which we can grasp the social and political realities in which we think and act.” We need “to break out of the self-centered narcissism of the national outlook and the dull incomprehension with which it infects thought and action,” and “enlighten human beings concerning the real internal cosmopolitanization of their lifeworlds and institutions.” A “realistic cosmopolitanism” cannot, however, “be developed in opposition to universalism, relativism, nationalism and ethnicism”; it has to be constructed as “their summation and synthesis.” Nationalism and cosmopolitanism can “mutually complement and correct each other.” Cosmopolitanization has to be understood, Beck concludes, as “a non-linear dialectical process in which the universal and the particular, the similar and the dissimilar, the global and the local are to be conceived, not as cultural polarities but as interconnected and interpenetrating principles.”8
This intricate dialectical formulation is hard to interpret, and there is more than a shadow of suspicion that Beck is trying to have his cosmopolitan cake and eat it here. In practice he abandons dialectics in favor of celebrating an epochal shift from a first to a second kind of modernity, from a society dedicated to the management of production to one concerned to manage risks (both social and environmental) and from one in which the principle “international law trumps human rights” gives way to “human rights trumps international law.” The first modernity “rests on the principle of collectivity, territoriality and borders,” while the second appeals to the bearers of human rights as individuals rather than as collective subjects such as “people” and “state.” These rights “are unthinkable without the universalistic claim to validity that grants these rights to all individuals, without regard to social status, class, gender, nationality or religion.” There are, Beck concedes, murky areas that allow human rights to be misused for more venal aims. We must therefore guard against a “fake cosmopolitanism” that “instrumentalises cosmopolitan rhetoric—the rhetoric of peace, of human rights, of global justice—for national-hegemonic purposes” (and he cites the Iraq War as a recent example of this “fake” agenda).9 It is, nevertheless, the universalism of individual human rights that grounds his cosmopolitanism.
On inspection, these rights turn out to be indistinguishable from those given in neoliberal theory. Beck does not consider other kinds of collective rights and solidarities. Critique here turns into justification. The political-economic ideology of possessive individualism is instantiated into a supposedly transcendent cosmopolitanism. Since rights require enforcement, Beck goes on to embrace “military humanism” of the sort the “liberal hawks” advocate in the United States and that NATO unleashed in the bombing of Serbia in defense of Kosovo. Beck even endorses the right of democratic governments (presumably of states he had earlier depicted as irrelevant and powerless!) to make preemptive threats of war or to take police actions (preferably collectively rather than unilaterally as has the United States in recent times) against leaders who abuse the human rights of their own populations.10 It is hard to distinguish all this from the actual practices of Blair or even Clinton/Bush. The distinction between fake and real cosmopolitanism in Beck’s scheme of things is as arbitrary and as blurred as is the distinction between neoliberalization and cosmopolitanism.
Beck also makes much of the purported cosmopolitan character of the European Union. Plainly, national sentiments have not disappeared, and in some respects they have been heightened within the Union, yet the adoption of a common legal framework and a common currency (though not for all), and the partial surrender of state sovereignty to the authorities in Brussels and the parliamentarians in Strasbourg, suggests acceptance of an alternative ordering of social relations on a vast terrain that now cuts across many languages and historical geographies from Poland to Portugal. European integration has made armed conflict between traditionally warring European nation-states more or less unthinkable, and has therefore realized one of Kant’s visions: “a pacific federation (foedus pacificum) . . . would differ from a peace treaty (pactum pacis) in that the latter terminates one war, whereas the former would seek the end to all wars for good. This federation does not aim to acquire any power like that of a state, but merely to preserve and secure the freedom of each state in itself, along with that of the other confederated states. . . . [The union of states will secure] the freedom of each state in accordance with the idea of institutional right, and the whole will gradually spread further and further.”11
Beck, Habermas, and others tend, therefore, to look upon the European Union as some kind of Kantian cosmopolitan construction.12 They then reflect upon the possibility of expanding this system worldwide. The meaning of nation in Europe has simultaneously been challenged by the migratory movements both within and from without the European Union. The evident multiculturalism in many European countries that were once relatively ethnically and linguistically homogeneous allows the idea of nation to embrace everything from a backward-looking authenticity, supposedly rooted deep in ancient myths (as Le Pen and the fascist movement holds so dear in France), to an instantaneous embrace of the forward-looking idea of national citizenship and newly constructed cultural belonging by recent immigrants who form the backbone of, for example, the French soccer team.
All this lends a cosmopolitan allure to recent European developments. But it also obscures the kind of union that has actually been created. While the European Union had the grander aim of making war between traditionally warring states more and more unlikely, its actual mechanics, beginning with the Monnet Plan and the Coal and Steel Agreement that took effect in 1952, have always been primarily economic. The Maastricht Accord, negotiated between the European States in 1992, was a neoliberal rather than a cosmopolitan construction. The resistance to the proposed European Constitution in 2005 was cast by many on the left (particularly in France, where it was defeated in a referendum) as a vote against its neoliberal character (those on the right objected to its dilution of national identity and the loss of nation-state sovereignty). To be sure, being neoliberal, the institutions of the Union make much reference to the legal and political principles of individual rights. The E.U. therefore does partially correspond to Beck’s ideal of a “cosmopolitan human rights regime,” which opens up certain avenues for progressive politics, particularly with respect to legal and civil, as opposed to economic, rights. But the specific rights regime it promotes inhibits any serious challenge to the rising tide of capitalist class and corporate power.
To this problem Beck replies that “true” cosmopolitanism arises out of, but is quite different from, both neoliberalism and globalization. This is so because cosmopolitanization “comprises the development of multiple loyalties as well as the increase in diverse transnational forms of life, the emergence of non-state political actors (from Amnesty International to the World Trade [Organization]), the development of global protest movements against [neoliberal] globalism and in support of a different kind of [cosmopolitan] globalization. People campaign for the right to work, for global protection of the environment, for the reduction of poverty, etc. To this extent these are the beginnings (however deformed) of an institutionalized cosmopolitanism, for example, in the paradoxical shape of the antiglobalization movement, the International Court of Justice and the United Nations.”13 What de Sousa Santos calls a “subaltern cosmopolitanism” arises out of the global opposition to neoliberal globalization and imperialism.14 But to make sense of this—and I will shortly attempt to do so—requires critical engagement with how the hegemonic theories and practices of neoliberal globalization and imperialism intersect with supposedly cosmopolitan practices. This is lacking in Beck’s account. The result, as Alain Badiou says of the Mitterrandistes in France (to which I would add the Blairites in Britain), is to make any kind of revolutionary political project unthinkable. Political horizons are reduced to “the humanitarian preaching of ethics” and the “liberal-democratic canonization of human rights as the only horizon within which politics might be possible”—which is pretty much where Beck leaves us and where Nussbaum seems to want to be.15 If this is what contemporary cosmopolitanism is about, then it is nothing other than an ethical and humanitarian mask for hegemonic neoliberal practices of class domination and financial and militaristic imperialism. It is inconceivable to Beck that, as Badiou and Rancière commonly hold, “the mainspring for the effervescent promotion of human rights and humanitarian interventions is a political nihilism, that its real aim is to have done with the very idea of an emancipatory politics.”16
While this may sound an unduly harsh judgment, I fear it is rather too close to the mark for comfort with respect to much of the new cosmopolitanism. Consider, for example, the voluminous and highly prominent work of David Held. Like Beck, Held argues that the facts of globalization necessarily require a turn toward cosmopolitan forms of governance. After reviewing these facts, he proposes some core principles for a system of global governance. These principles are: “(1) equal worth and dignity; (2) active agency; (3) personal responsibility and accountability; (4) consent; (5) collective decision-making about public matters through voting procedures; (6) inclusiveness and subsidiarity; (7) avoidance of serious harm; and (8) sustainability.” The principles fall into three clusters. The first (1–3) concerns the rights and responsibilities of individuals and is thoroughly neoliberal in tone; the second (4–6) states how the actions of individuals might best be collectivized; and the third (7–8) points toward the ends to which public decisions should be oriented. Cosmopolitanism ultimately denotes, says Held, “the ethical and political space occupied by the eight principles.” He goes on to acknowledge that “while cosmopolitanism affirms principles which are universal in their scope, it recognizes, in addition, that the precise meaning of these is always fleshed out in situated discussions; in other words that there is an inescapable hermeneutic complexity in moral and political affairs which will affect how the principles are interpreted and the weight granted to special ties and other practical-political issues” (my italics).17 This caveat has immense implications. Not only does it hold out the prospect of a totally fragmented world, in which everything from personal responsibility and accountability to sustainability gets interpreted any which way, thereby rendering the whole schema meaningless, but it also opens up Kant’s hidden dilemma of how to square local laws with universal requirements.
What for Held is a mere moment of situated hermeneutic complexity would be the whole story for anyone with Burkean or Heideggerian leanings. The only answer Held proposes is to postulate a “layered cosmopolitanism,” reflective of local, national, and regional affiliations. But he makes no attempt to understand how this layering is actually produced and at what scales. Nor does he examine the implications of “situatedness” and the “hermeneutic complexities” with which it may be associated. This would entail confronting directly the geographical, anthropological, and ecological preconditions that Nussbaum and Kant both consider important to any formulation of a cosmopolitan politics. Having all too briefly opened the Pandora’s box of geographical relativism through confessing local forms of hermeneutical complexity, Held immediately slams it shut with the unexplained observation that his cosmopolitan principles effectively “delimit and govern the range of diversity and difference that ought to be found in public life.” This allows him to claim (spuriously) that the “irreducible plurality of forms of life” to be found in different geographical situations is adequately factored into his cosmopolitanism and that his principles remain inviolable because they are of a sort that “all could reasonably assent to.”18 The use of “reasonably” as well as the “assent” inserted into the argument here is telling. It produces a powerful echo of Kant’s (and Burke’s) appeal to “mature individuals” as the only acceptable participants in discussions. The elitism (and potential class content) of this form of cosmopolitanism becomes clear.
But Held needs something else for his system of cosmopolitan governance to work: “there can be no adequate institutionalization of equal rights and duties without a corresponding institutionalization of national and transnational forms of public debate, democratic participation, and accountability. The institutionalization of regulative cosmopolitan principles requires the entrenchment of democratic public realms.” This last conditionality could be viewed as an intensely radicalizing proposition in its own right. Three decades of neoliberalization have greatly diminished the scope and effectiveness of participatory democracy in many parts of the world (with the notable exception of Latin America, South Africa, and dubious democratization in what was once the communist bloc). The democratic deficit has been growing by leaps and bounds, particularly in the United States where, through the complex mix of legal and illegal corruptions, the only democracy left is that of raw money power. What Bush actually has in mind when he speaks of democratizing the Middle East is, by this measure, unthinkably corrupt. There is, however, an odd tendency in much of the new cosmopolitanism to assume that more or less adequate models of democracy have already been constructed within the framework of the leading nation-states and that the only problem remaining is to find ways to extend these models across all jurisdictions. This is what Held’s idea of a “layered cosmopolitanism” attempts. The severe curtailment of the democratic public realm and the shift toward unaccountable juridical and executive power (often masked by the term governance) even within the leading nation-states passes by unremarked.19
Behind all these presentations lies a problem of understanding the shifting spatial scale of capitalistic activity and organization. Much of what now goes on under the rubric of “globalization” escapes the confines of the nation-state and requires (and to some degree has already produced) a broader territorial reach of law, regulation, and governance. This is particularly the case with environmental issues, such as global warming, acid deposition, stratospheric ozone depletion, and the like. Cosmopolitanism seeks to rationalize these new systems both procedurally and substantively, which means, Beck argues, that “the analysis of cosmopolitanization can and must be developed in both the spatial and the temporal dimensions.” But he claims, rather surprisingly (and in total opposition to Mehta), that the spatial question “has already been worked out” and that it is only the temporal dimension that remains a problem. But when we turn to how he thinks the spatial dimension has been worked out, we simply find the banal idea that cosmopolitanization “replaces national-national relations with national-global and global-global relational patterns.”20 Beck evidently accepts unthinkingly the Kantian separation of space from time and believes that the sorts of geographical issues that exercised Burke and Mehta (let alone geographers and other spatial analysts like Lefebvre) have no relevance for his universal theorizations.
Part of the difficulty here arises out of coming to grips with the changing role of the nation-state. The sociological imagination (from C. Wright Mills’s classic enunciation onward), as well as much of political and international relations theory, has long taken the nation-state as the solid and unquestioned framing for empirical analysis and social theory. The belated recognition that this is not (and never really was) an adequate geographical framework for investigating social and ecological relations has prompted the search for alternatives. Beck’s work, for example, is primarily addressed to sociologists, urging them to break with their traditional state-centered approach to knowledge and adopt a more universal language. S. Sassen, another sociologist, likewise argues that “existing theory is not enough to map today’s multiplication of non-state actors and forms of cross-border cooperation and conflict, such as global business networks, NGOs, diasporas, global cities, transboundary public spheres, and the new cosmopolitanisms.” The problem is, she says, that “models and theories remain focused on the logic of relations between states and the scale of the state at a time when we see a proliferation of non-state actors, cross-border processes, and associated changes in the scope, exclusivity and competence of state authority over its territory.” In this dispersion, she argues, the new digital technologies have played a major role. The Internet has also “enabled a new type of cross-border politics that can bypass interstate politics,” and “this produces a specific kind of activism, one centered on multiple localities yet connected digitally at scales larger than the local, often reaching a global scale.”21
The various specialized networks and domains of regulation, law, governance, and political activism spill over state boundaries to produce, Sassen argues, new spatialities and temporalities that unsettle existing arrangements. Sassen does not abandon the nation-state framework but seeks to reinterpret the nation-state’s role, while acknowledging the rise of other important layers (as Held might put it) in global exchanges and governance. All this has tremendous implications for how we understand citizenship. In the Stoic cosmopolitan tradition we consider ourselves purely citizens of the world, but Kant modified that substantially, maintaining a federal structure to the interstate system and thereby injecting into the mix the connections between nation, state, sovereignty, and citizenship. But citizenship that used to be exercised mainly in bounded communities now has multiple locations. Some people have dual nationality, others carry multiple passports, and when it comes to allegiances, loyalties, and participation, many more have complicated relations with more than one space in the global economy simultaneously. Residents of New York City, for example, have important official positions in Jamaican and Chinese townships. This is also the case for corporate executives and the legal/ accounting experts who operate across many borders; the government officials charged with managing the apparatus of interstate relations (including those in international institutions, as well as those engaged in international police work and intelligence gathering); the vast number of both legal and illegal migrant workers (the latter often performing active citizenship roles without any legal or political status); and the social movement activists with their coordinating cross-border networks. Internally, as A. Ong usefully points out, a country like China, with its complicated structure of special economic development zones of various kinds and its urban-rural legal distinctions (recently abolished), constructs an internal mosaic of definitions of citizenship. Benhabib points (as does Held) to the layered structure of citizenship rights that seems to emerge external to the nation-state (for example, within the European Union). There are, she says, “multiple levels of organization, association, and networks of interdependence” within the world, and “multilayered governance” can “ameliorate stark oppositions between global aspirations and local self-determination.” If we view the world in this multilayered way, then “the question becomes one of mediating among these varied levels so as to create more convergence upon some commonly agreed-upon standards . . . but through locally, nationally, or regionally interpreted, instituted and organized initiatives.”22
While there are strong parallels with Held’s arguments on “layering” in this passage, Benhabib goes on to do battle with a powerful group of communitarian thinkers, most notably Michael Walzer, who takes a broadly Burkean position when he writes that “men and women do indeed have rights beyond life and liberty, but these do not follow from our common humanity; they follow from shared conceptions of social goods; they are local and particular in character.” Walzer emphasizes the “distinctiveness of cultures and groups” and suggests that if this distinctiveness is valued (“as most people seem to believe”), then “closure must be permitted somewhere” and “something like the sovereign state must take shape and claim the authority to make its own admissions policy, and to control and sometimes restrain the flow of immigrants.” Benhabib objects to this “anthropological” idea that “shared cultural commonalities will always trump human rights claims.” The effect is to create a far too restrictive (spatial?) domain within which citizenship claims can be made.23
It will evidently be difficult to reconcile universal ethics with the undoubtedly deep feelings and emotional attachments that people have to their homes, their local traditions, and to various kinds of “imagined communities” (such as the nation). That human rights, duties, and obligations necessarily extend beyond the borders of the nation-state (or territorial jurisdiction) is clear. Beck’s focus on a cosmopolitan human rights regime is, therefore, fully justified in principle. The problem, however, is that he and Held both have a very narrow and individualistic definition of rights, far too close to the neoliberal ethic for comfort. There are many different proposals for a proper conception of rights in relation to a just social order. Iris Marion Young, for example, in her influential text Justice and the Politics of Difference, drawing upon the experience of urban social movements, defines rights in opposition to what she calls “the five faces of oppression”:24 exploitation of labor in both the workplace and the living space; marginalization of social groups by virtue of their identity; powerlessness (lack of resources to participate meaningfully in political life); cultural imperialism (symbolic denigration of particular elements in the population); and violence (within the family as well as within society at large). The right to alleviate these oppressions by various forms of collective action lies outside the norms of neoliberal thinking. Nussbaum, for her part, locates her thinking in the philosophical tradition that stretches from Aristotle through Grotius to the young Marx of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (where Marx takes up the Kantian concept of species being). Nussbaum takes from Grotius the idea that the human being must be understood “as a creature characterized both by dignity and moral worth” (ideas, it should be noted, fundamental to the Zapatistas) and by an “impelling desire for fellowship, that is for common life, not of just any kind, but a peaceful life, and organized according to the measure of intelligence, with those who are of his kind.” Nussbaum here gives specific content to the rights that derive from our species being. She spells out a list of “central human capabilities” to which everyone might then be expected to aspire. These capabilities are
This formulation, which contrasts markedly with Held’s way of constituting the space of cosmopolitan thinking, is outcome-based rather than procedural.25
In Nussbaum’s articulation of the capabilities approach, she makes a number of noteworthy claims. As might be expected, she gives considerable philosophical depth to her arguments. Her critique of Rawls’s influential extension of his theory of justice to relations between states in The Law of the Peoples is trenchant. “By assuming the fixity of states as his starting point,” Rawls effectively prevents “any serious consideration of economic inequalities and inequalities of power among states.” The upshot is that he ratifies “philosophically what the powerful nations of the world, especially the United States, like to do anyway,” refusing to “change internally, whether in matters of human rights or in environmental matters or in matters of economic policy, either in response to the situation of the rest of the world or in response to international treaties and agreements.”26 One should not, Nussbaum concludes, grant “philosophical respectability” to such “an arrogant mentality that is culpably unresponsive to grave problems.” Benhabib voices similar objections to the exclusionary nationalism that arises out of Rawls’s contention that peoples and not states “are the relevant moral and sociological actors in reasoning about justice on a global scale.” People do not, as Rawls presumes, live in bounded communities characterized by a clearly identifiable moral nature marked by common sympathies.27
Nussbaum believes that her capabilities approach also advances our understanding of human rights, since it emphasizes “many of the entitlements that are also stressed in the human rights movement: political liberties, freedom of association, the free-choice of occupation, and a variety of social and economic rights.” The capabilities she defines are very different, however, from the rights that neoliberalism typically prescribes (and she explicitly refutes neoliberal interpretations of the U.S. Constitution). They also constitute a very different cosmopolitan space to that proposed by either Held or Beck. Capabilities give “important precision and supplementation to the language of rights.”28 This is the precision that Beck so sorely lacks. Had he adopted something like Nussbaum’s list, his descent into a covert defense of neoliberalization and overt advocacy of military humanism would almost certainly have been halted. Nussbaum even claims that pluralism and the right to difference are protected from within the terms of the list she provides. In this she is, however, on shaky ground, even though her justifications are far more sophisticated than the cavalier assertions of Held on this point. While it is true that freedoms of thought and association are necessary conditions for the sustenance of pluralism, they are far from sufficient, and there are other capabilities, such as control over the political environment, that can all too easily work in an opposite, exclusionary direction. Furthermore, she neglects to consider how class, ethnic, gender, and other differences become instantiated in socio-spatial structures (such as the ghettoes of both rich and poor) that perpetuate differences (some but not all of which are unjust if not downright objectionable) by way of the geographical structures of segregation in human socialization. The deracinated and aspatial mode of her thinking can be subjected to exactly the same critical scrutiny to which Mehta subjected liberal and Lockean theory. Nussbaum does, however, make one other principled point: some capabilities (such as life and bodily integrity) cannot be realized without equality, while others (such as play and liberty of the senses) are best specified in terms of some minimum threshold beyond which all manner of differences can flourish. The capabilities approach is, therefore, only partially egalitarian. Finally, her approach has the advantage that it promotes an affirmative politics oriented to the achievement of incremental goals, rather than a politics derived from a list of duties and obligations that many would recoil from as too onerous.
There remains the difficulty, however, of specifying concrete means to realize such desirable outcomes. “Philosophy is good at normative reasoning and laying out general structures of thought,” Nusbaum concedes, but “any very concrete prescriptions for implementation need to be made in partnership with other disciplines.”29 Her agenda is to lay out such a compelling moral vision of the good life that all who read her will be persuaded to think about how to get there. In this she succeeds well enough. Our world would unquestionably be a superior place if her capabilities approach were to displace the individualistic and market-driven ethics derived from neoliberal theory.
The suggestions Nussbaum does make on “how to get there” are, however, deeply problematic. Not only do they appear utopian and naïve, as well as onerous in the way that her capabilities approach supposedly avoids, but also some of the means she suggests turn out to be antagonistic to the ends. She begins by pointing out, correctly in my view, that while we are all, ultimately, responsible for realizing the capabilities for everyone else, in practice we need institutions through which much of that work must be accomplished. Much rests, therefore, on the nature and behavior of the institutions we construct. This is where her difficulties begin. For example, she suddenly mounts a strong and very surprising defense of the nation-state as a basic institution through which her capabilities approach might be realized, on the grounds that “the ability to join with others to give one another laws is a fundamental aspect of human freedom. Being autonomous in this sense is no trivial matter: it is part of having a chance to live a fully human life. In our day as in Grotius’ time, the fundamental unit through which people exercise this fundamental aspect of human freedom is the nation-state: it is the largest and most foundational unit that still has any chance of being decently accountable to the people who live there. . . . Thus the nation state and its basic structure are, as Grotius already argued, a key locus for persons’ exercise of their freedom.”30
We need, she seems to be saying, some territorial/geographical form of organization to realize human capabilities, and the only way her universal and deracinated abstractions can be brought to earth is through the very same nation-state whose powers she had earlier, in the name of a principled cosmopolitanism, decried. Beck, Held, and Nussbaum all seem to run into the same problem without any sense of how complicated the problem is. In Nussbaum’s case, her sudden resurrection of the nation-state as a positive site of human association permits her to reaffirm Kant’s “moral belief that one should respect the sovereignty of any nation that is organized in a sufficiently accountable way, whether or not its institutions are fully just.” One will then “refrain from military intervention into the affairs of that nation, and one will negotiate with its duly elected government as a legitimate government.” While it certainly puts a brake upon Beck’s swashbuckling military humanism, this positioning of the nation-state as a crucial mediator raises as many issues as it solves, for all the reasons we have already considered. As anarchist theorists are wont to correctly point out, there are many other ways in which to construct “foundational units” that are accountable.
There is a deep tension between Nussbaum’s fierce commitment to antinationalism and her positioning of the nation-state as the primary institution through which capabilities will be realized. The universalities of the latter are in danger of being trumped by exactly that right to collective self-determination within the sovereign state that Rawls finds fundamental and to which Nussbaum so vociferously objects. The primary duty within each nation-state is, Nussbaum insists in a desperate attempt to rescue her position, to promote the capabilities she lists to at least a threshold level. The secondary duty is formulated as a simple Rawlsian moral argument: “nations should give a substantial proportion of their GDP to poorer nations.” Both of these moral obligations are onerous in the extreme, and it is not hard to see how people might recoil from supporting them. Nussbaum does not even invoke (as someone like Pogge, in extending Rawls’s views, does) the moral principle that something is owed to, say, Africa because of the history of colonial and neocolonial plundering of that continent by imperial powers and the continued extraction of surpluses through mechanisms of trade and resource exploitation. This is an astonishingly naïve view of what the contemporary state and the capitalistic organization of space are actually about. She also says that “multinational corporations have responsibilities for promoting human capabilities in the regions in which they operate” and that “the main structures of the global economic order must be designed to be fair to poor and developing countries.”31 But the neoliberal forms in which these institutional arrangements are currently cast are precisely designed to frustrate the capabilities she desires because they are largely designed and expertly utilized to sustain and enhance class power. Corporations through their globalization strategies have increasingly escaped regulation over the last thirty years. They have effectively stymied all attempts to regulate them internationally by setting up their own organization for corporate social responsibility (to which most of the world’s leading corporations belong). When not merely engaging in public relations exercises, they use their power of social engagement and promotion to advance their neoliberalizing agenda (by setting up market advocacy NGOs, colloquially known as MANGOs, for example). Though they relish their standing as legal individuals in certain situations, they have made sure that this stops at the doors of the International Criminal Court, thus ensuring they cannot be sued for environmental damages or for abuse of human rights with respect to the labor they employ or the products they produce. They have ensured that corporate responsibility within the European Union is merely “voluntary,” on the surprising grounds that they need to maintain sufficient flexibility to deal sensitively with geographical and cultural differences. Nussbaum’s uncritical attachment to naïve liberal theories of the state, corporations, and markets lies in deep contradiction to the political and collectivist tradition derived from Aristotle, Grotius, and the young Marx that informs her capabilities approach.
These chronic failures on the part of the new cosmopolitans to ground their theories in spaces and places in effective ways or, when they naïvely attempt to do so, not to go much beyond conventional neoliberal wisdoms make it tempting to dismiss their whole line of argument as yet another moral or legalistic mask for the continuance of elite class and imperialist power. I think such dismissal is premature. We first need to ask: in what ways can a cosmopolitan project of opposition to cosmopolitan neoliberalism be formulated? There are, I first note, three ways in which cosmopolitanism can arise: out of philosophical reflection; out of an assessment of practical requirements and basic human needs; or out of the ferment of social movements that are engaged in transforming the world each in their own ways. Nussbaum draws heavily on the first, appeals to the second through the acknowledged influence of Sen’s remarkable work on famines and food security, but ignores the third. I think it vital to integrate the diversity of thinking and practices of social movements into the analysis. This is the path that Iris Marion Young took in Justice and the Politics of Difference. In her final chapter, she attempts a derivation of what virtues are possible and reasonable, building upon an earlier analysis of the diverse faces of oppression as these are manifest in the tangible circumstances of contemporary city life. She specifies not only what the eradication of injustice demands, but also what a virtuous outcome would look like. In so doing she gives new meaning to universal concepts through the lenses of social movements, as well as from the geographical standpoint of contemporary urban life (albeit in the United States).32
De Sousa Santos follows a similar strategy with a more internationalist dimension (though without the urban emphasis). The excluded populations of the world need, he says, “a subaltern cosmopolitanism” expressive of their needs and reflective of their condition. “Whoever is a victim of local intolerance and discrimination needs cross-border tolerance and support; whoever lives in misery in a world of wealth needs cosmopolitan solidarity; whoever is a non- or second-class citizen of a country or the world needs an alternative conception of national and global friendship. In short, the large majority of the world’s population, excluded from top-down cosmopolitan projects, needs a different kind of cosmopolitanism.”33 Our task as academics and intellectuals is not to speak for but to amplify the voice of “those who have been victimized by neoliberal globalization, be they indigenous peoples, landless peasants, impoverished women, squatter settlers, sweatshop workers or undocumented immigrants.” Much of what is touted as “governance,” he rightly argues, is suspect because it is merely “the political matrix of neoliberal globalization,” even when it incorporates the poor or their representatives as relevant stakeholders. This is the primary way (as the case of microfinance so clearly demonstrates) in which “the hegemony of transnational capital and the main capitalist powers gets reproduced.” The underlying tensions between the capitalistic and territorial logics of power that de Sousa Santos here identifies all too often lead directly, as I have shown elsewhere, into economic, political, and militaristic imperialism.34 The political moves that occurred from the mid-1970s onward from “the central state to devolution/decentralization, from the political to the technical; from popular participation to the expert system; from the public to the private; from the state to the market” constructed the new neoliberal regime epitomized by the Washington Consensus. The silences within this governance matrix with respect to social justice, equality, and conceptions of rights that go beyond the liberal ideal of individual autonomy signal, in de Sousa Santos’s view, “the defeat of critical theory.”35 Young and de Sousa Santos establish a critical perspective that is lacking in the formulations of Beck and Held, and which sadly disappears from Nussbaum’s purview.
The more explicit formulation of what a subaltern cosmopolitanism might be about depends on how we characterize the counter-hegemonic social movements that are currently in motion. What is called “globalization from below” is generating considerable political energy for progressive changes in the global system. These struggles, Sassen argues, are geographically fragmented and specific. They are:
global through the knowing multiplication of local practices. . . . These practices are also institution-building work with global scope that can come from localities and networks of localities with limited resources and from informal social actors. We see here the potential transformation of actors “confined” to domestic roles into actors in global networks without having to leave their work and roles in their communities. From being experienced as purely domestic and local, these “domestic” settings are transformed into microenvironments articulated with global circuits. They do not have to become cosmopolitan in this process: they may well remain domestic and particularistic in their orientation and remain engaged with their households and local community struggles, and yet they are engaging in emergent global politics. A community of practice can emerge that creates multiple lateral, horizontal communications, collaborations, solidarities, and supports.36
Sassen refuses to interpret all this in terms of “the cosmopolitan route to the global,” and views it rather “as micro-instances of partial and incipient denationalization” or of “relational nationality.”37 De Sousa Santos, who would almost certainly concur with Sassen’s description, would doubtless argue that this is precisely the form that a subaltern cosmopolitanism should and will take. I raise this point because it is impossible to characterize the cosmopolitanism incipient in social movements without confronting their geographical dispersal and frequently highly localized specificities, and also recognizing that their aim is not necessarily to change the world but to change the deleterious conditions in some particular part of it. If the only way that coal miners in Russia, sweatshop workers in Thailand, factory laborers in China, trafficked women in Europe, and lost children in Darfur can change the world is by revolutionizing the neoliberal global order, then so be it. There is nothing wrong with a subaltern cosmopolitan perspective remaining particularistic and local in orientation, provided the dialectical connectivity to global conditions is sustained. But at this point de Sousa Santos’s view that the only task for critical intellectuals is to “amplify the voice of victimized” itself poses a barrier to deeper critical engagement. Vital though that role is, even a subaltern cosmopolitanism has to engage critically in the task of translation of particularist demands and local engagements into a common language of opposition to the neoliberal capitalism and imperialist strategies that lie at the root of current problems. But this in turn requires a far deeper understanding of how the geographical principles of space and place construction relate to the actual unfolding of any cosmopolitan project. In other words, we have to unpack what Held rushes over as “situated hermeneutic complexity” and answer the question that Nussbaum leaves dangling as to what kind of geographical, anthropological, and ecological knowledge is appropriate for a cosmopolitan education.
The glory of the dialectical method that Beck advocates but does not follow is that it can, when properly practiced, create a unity within and out of difference at the same time as it understands all too well the stresses and contradictions that arise through the uneven development of situated struggles around different conceptions of rights, capabilities, and governance. To operationalize all this entails, as Kant long ago noted, a particular combination of intelligence and judgment, the ability to generate acute and subtle understandings rather than “empty sophistries and conceited prattlings.” None of us can claim to be immune from falling into errors of the latter sort. What does, therefore, require a prior moral and intellectual commitment is that we should offer each other mutual aid in developing the kinds of subaltern cosmopolitanisms (and the pluralization of the term is deliberate) that can generate emancipatory theory and politics across a politics of difference. This brings us back to the idea of a located and embodied, “actually existing” cosmopolitanism that, as Bruce Robbins puts it, acknowledges “the actual historical and geographical contexts from which it emerges” and does not regard the prospect of pluralizing and particularizing its propositions as somehow fatal to its global reach.38 But for this to happen requires that we first answer the question that Nussbaum and Kant invoked and which everyone else at some point or other encounters (often with frustration, or in some instances with cavalier dismissal): what geographical, ecological, and anthropological knowledges would be required for any decent, and in this case subaltern, cosmopolitan project to succeed?