Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory

Richard Beardsworth

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745637303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Globalization has been contested in recent times. Among the critical perspectives is cosmopolitanism. Yet, with the exception of normative theory, international relations as a field has ignored cosmopolitan thinking. This book redresses this gap and develops a dialogue between cosmopolitanism and international relations. The dialogue is structured around three debates between non-universalist theories of international relations and contemporary cosmopolitan thought.

The theories chosen are realism, (post-)Marxism and postmodernism. All three criticize liberalism in the international domain, and, therefore, cosmopolitanism as an offshoot of liberalism. In the light of each school's respective critique of universalism, the book suggests both the importance and difficulty of the cosmopolitan perspective in the contemporary world. Beardsworth emphasizes the need for global leadership at nation-state level, re-embedding of the world economy, a cosmopolitan politics of the lesser violence, and cosmopolitan political judgement. He also suggests research agendas to situate further contemporary cosmopolitanism in international relations theory.

This book will appeal to all students of political theory and international relations, especially those who are seeking more articulation of the main issues between cosmopolitanism and its critics in international relations.

1

The Spectrum of Cosmopolitanism

This chapter serves the following three functions:

1 It provides a philosophical introduction to basic cosmopolitan ideas.

2 It underlines the differences within contemporary cosmopolitan thought, differences of modality (moral, normative or institutional cosmopolitanism, for example) that express a range of positions concerning international and global political reality.

3 It shows that these different positions are also mutually reinforcing and should be considered and theorized as complementary.

Following these three goals, this chapter presents, therefore, a spectrum of cosmopolitan positions, within which important differences and complementarities can be analysed with precision and clarity. The assumption of different positions is commonplace in contemporary cosmopolitan literature (see Benhabib, 2009; G. W. Brown, 2009; Cabrera, 2004; Caney, 2005; Heater, 1996 and 2002; Miller, 2007a; Pogge, 1992); the emphasis on complementarity in the context of IR is mine.¹ This chapter thereby frames the following dialogues between IR theory and cosmopolitanism by providing a conceptual set of distinctions.

The chapter contains two sections. The first provides a short narrative of the historical background to what I call the ‘cosmopolitan disposition’ in general. In the second section, I give an exposition of the spectrum of cosmopolitan differences and complementarities, in order of increasing determinateness, cultural, moral, normative, institutional, legal and political modalities of cosmopolitanism. I note, finally, that my readings are selective, but fairly comprehensive in substance and that several arguments within the exposition of different cosmopolitanisms are particular to me, but make sense of later discussion.

1 The Historical Background to the Cosmopolitan Disposition

There are three major moments of cosmopolitan thought prior to recent and current re-engagement with its problematic and disposition. The first is the Stoic moment, the second that of natural law theory, the third that of European Enlightenment thought, in general, and Kantian cosmopolitanism, in particular.

As a specific way of thinking the world as a polis (literally, a city-state or polity), cosmopolitanism emerges, from out of religious and mythical cosmology, in the Greek Stoic writings of Diogenes (c. 413–327 BCE), Zeno the Stoa (c. 334–262 BCE) and Chrysippus (c. 280–206 BCE). Diogenes the Cynic is considered the first to describe himself as ‘a citizen of the world’. ‘When anyone asked him what country he came from, he said, “I am a citizen of the world (kosmopolit

s)” ’, that is, a member of the polis of the universe (Laertius, n.d.). The self-description meant specifically, for Diogenes, that all natural or man-made borders are morally contingent. A citizen, by chance, of the Athenian polis, Diogenes belonged morally to the universe. The cosmopolitan disposition emerges from out of this ironic, moral outlook on the contingency of Athenian citizenship and political empire. This outlook leads to two conceptions of the polis: one transcendent and borderless; the other contingent and bounded. Outside the terms of myth and religion, it provides the intellectual framework that permits the normative critique of empirical politics and loyalties. For Zeno and Chrysippus, the universe constitutes a polis because it is organized under law in distinction to chaos (Schofield, 1991, pp. 67–86). Members of the cosmopolis are gods and men only insofar as they obey laws through reason. Wider citizenship requires greater rationality. In Stoic cosmopolitanism a relation of identity is thereby set up among the universe (cosmos), reason (logos), law (nomos) and citizenship (cosmopolitein). This identity, together with the moral and normative framework it endorses, is refined in Roman Stoicism at the historical moment of violent transition from the Roman republic to the Roman imperium, in the authorships of Cicero (106–43 BCE), Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE), and Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE). Seneca writes for example:

Let us embrace with our minds two commonwealths (res publicae): one great and truly common – in which gods and men are contained, in which we look not to this or that corner, but measure the bounds of the our state (civitas) with the sun; the other the one to which the particular circumstances of birth have assigned us – the commonwealth of the Athenians or the Carthaginians or some other city (urbs) which pertains not to all men but to a particular group of them. Some give service to both commonwealths at the same time – some only to the lesser, some to the greater. (Seneca, De otio, Book 4, quoted in Schofield, 1991, p. 91)

Seneca’s conception of the two cities offers not only a critique of empire, but, again, the terms within which the lesser, contingent polis can be appraised through a rational understanding of humanity and a moral conception of community and solidarity. This conception ultimately places the field of politics under the normative horizon of rational moral constraint. The Greek and Roman variants of Stoic cosmopolitanism provide therefore the embryonic language through which ethical behaviour is untied from religious custom and retied to political and legal system.

With the Christianization of the Roman Empire of the fourth century CE, the moral tenor of cosmopolitanism is resituated within the universality of Judeo-Christian monotheism. Augustine’s The City of God, for example, pits the city of the Christian God and its moral duties against those of Rome when Augustine restricts himself to the power relations between them; when he attempts to lay out a comprehensive political theory, he subordinates the laws of the latter to those of the former (Augustine, 1972, Book V). With the European dissemination of Christian institutions (dogma, diocese, church, monastery) Stoic moral cosmopolitanism fuses with Christian universalism to forge, from the late European medieval age through to the Renaissance, the critical language of natural law theory. From Aquinas to important Thomists like Francisco di Vitoria (1492–1546 CE) and Francisco Suârez (1548–1617 CE), natural laws are deemed those given to humans as rational offspring of divinely-inspired creation (Finnis, 1992). These laws are those of ‘natural’ justice to which positive legal laws should bend: they are, most importantly, those of moral equality, of peaceful co-belonging, of just war (Brown et al., 2004, pp. 311–23). Natural law theory gives rise to the notion of ‘natural rights’. Despite its evident ambiguities and hypocrisies ensconced within the language of Christendom (to which I return), natural law theory thereby prepares the ground for modern political egalitarianism.

In the third moment, of European Enlightenment thought, a consequent and more systematic cosmopolitanism emerges. I claim that it provides the overall framework within which contemporary cosmopolitan ideas are, in general, discussed, even if weaker forms of cosmopolitanism resist the move to universalize moral personhood. This framework is best found in the work of Immanuel Kant and his ethical and political writings (1784, 1785, 1788, 1793, 1795, 1797). Kant constitutes such an instrumental figure in modern cosmopolitanism and its contemporary reconfigurations that this chapter returns to him several times; here I situate his thought in the context of this brief history. Indebted to the Stoics (Nussbaum, 1997), Kant aims to maintain the identity posited between human nature, reason and law within modernizing processes. The cosmos can no longer be placed under the rule of law. Human cognitive agents know nothing of its internal workings as a whole. Rational concepts of the world are accordingly ‘speculative ideas’ only: they have no relation to the empirical and cannot be verified (Kant, 1781/1929, pp. 315–26). These ideas have, conversely, speculative interest: they are thoughts of totality that testify to the rational vocation of the human species. More importantly, this interest is not only speculative, it is also practical. Reason has, for Kant, an immediate effect on the human will (1788/1956, pp. 74–91). As both rational and sensible beings, humans necessarily take a pure moral interest in the moral law. If human beings feel guilt when they believe that they have behaved wrongly, if they admire examples of virtue in both the moral and political domains, it is because they have a rational will, however overriding their inclinations to self-interest prove to be in everyday life (1785/1987, p. 55). For Kant, the existential ‘fact’ of the rational will places ethical motivation immediately in the empirical field. Kant then extrapolates that human beings are members of a ‘kingdom of ends’. Transposed from the ethics of the New Testament – for Kant, the most moral of all religious writings – this kingdom constitutes an ethical realm in which each has an absolute worth in himself or herself (ibid., p. 56). It is this absolute worth of the individual that makes the New Testament morally outstanding. When taken as means to others’ ends, individuals have a ‘price’. When considered as ends in themselves – that is, autonomous givers to themselves of their own ends – they have ‘value’ and ‘dignity’ (ibid.). Bearing dignity, individuals constitute ‘moral persons’ with their own agency (ibid., pp. 57 and 63). Moral personality anticipates a system of universal laws in which it is both subject of, and subject to, these laws (self-determination).

Kant’s moral community of ends is a direct translation of the Stoic cosmopolitan polis, supplemented by Christian individuality, in the context of modernity. The dignity of the moral person organizes the moral and normative critique of hierarchical societies. It leads Kant, politically, to a liberal republicanism: the political philosophy of a liberal community in which each person is free to the extent that his freedom does not harm the freedom of others under the rule of ‘public law’ (in Kantian terms, das Recht). I come back to this critical understanding of liberalism several times in my responses to IR critiques of cosmopolitanism. Morality is thus harnessed to politics through the mechanism of law (das Recht) (Kant, 1793 and 1795).

Kant’s liberal republicanism is both consistent and systematic. If the category of moral personality is universal for all rational human beings, then, for Kant, the moral critique of empirical polity must itself be universal. The universality of personal dignity is therefore a given at all levels of political organization. In his essay ‘Perpetual Peace’, for example, the ideology of liberal republicanism leads Kant to posit, beyond the international laws of states’ mutual obligations to each other, a cosmopolitan law (ius cosmopoliticum) of states and individuals, and a world republic in which both states and individuals achieve political personality as ‘world citizens’ (Kant, 1795/1991, pp. 98–104). I address the conceptual dilemmas in this argument in sections 2.3 and 2.5 below on normative and legal cosmopolitanism.

In its three major historical moments, cosmopolitan discourse posits that geographical and political borders are morally contingent. It institutes thereby a conceptual difference between the normative and the positive by distinguishing between two forms of humanity and two forms of polity: one moral, the other political; one moral and rationally necessary, the other civic and contingent. A relation between these two forms of humanity and community is upheld because humans are endowed with reason, and their reason comes to recognize what is law. In the recognition of law, contingently embedded humans move towards moral community. This relation provides a regulative framework in which empirical political systems and loyalties can be judged according to the criterion of ‘natural justice’. It is only, however, in the third Kantian (liberal republican) moment that an institutional mechanism is identified that mediates between the moral and the political: the legislative domain of public law (das Recht), whose legitimating source is the dignity of the moral person.

These conceptual outcomes of cosmopolitan history make up the basis of what I henceforth call the ‘cosmopolitan disposition’. Someone, some collectivity or, simply, some argument that has a cosmopolitan disposition embodies the following traits. First, it considers natural or artificial borders contingent and therefore focuses on a common humanity beyond ethnic, religious, class, or gender particularities. Given this contingency of borders, second, it has an overriding interest in humanity and/or in justice as the basic scheme of world society: this interest is either rooted, more weakly, on one’s humanity as a human individual, or, more strongly, on one’s dignity as a moral person. And, third, it looks to world-embracing institutional arrangements through rational judgement and the mechanism of public law. I now turn to contemporary engagements with this disposition and work through a spectrum of cosmopolitan distinctions and complementarities that will be of use when confronting IR theory.

2 The Cosmopolitan Spectrum

2.1 Cultural cosmopolitanism

Although the following debates between cosmopolitanism and IR theory do not deal specifically with the politics of culture, when I refer to the cultural dimensions of cosmopolitanism, I have two types of argument in mind. I take as my examples the cosmopolitan writings of the philosopher Kwame Appiah (Appiah, 1997 and 2006), of the comparative political theorist Fred Dallmayr (1996 and 2002), and of the sociologist Ulrich Beck (2006).

The first type of argument is explicitly rehearsed by thinkers like Appiah and Dallmayr, who are responding to globalization. For Appiah, economic globalization provokes uncertainty and the loss of identity. Fundamentalist reactions to it are therefore understandable and must be countered by a culture of ‘cosmopolitan contamination’ (2006, p. 18). Arguing against both retrenchment on given identities and a homogenous system of global values, Appiah affirms the mixture of cultures, particular to any culture as such, and foregrounds a ‘dialectic of understanding’ within which the common space of humanity can be reflectively explored. Religious, cultural, social and political differences are, therefore, cognized and respected within an indeterminate notion of humanity on the one condition that they are not exclusive of other forms of difference (ibid., pp. 31, 98, 115). I would argue that this modality of cosmopolitanism is eminently cultural because it seeks to avoid ideology (liberal or non-liberal) and pitches itself at the level of a widening sensibility and understanding which either avoid or aim below determinate forms of rational argument.

Fred Dallmayr’s project to open up Western forms of rationality to internal and external forms of otherness in Beyond Orientalism (1996), and to promote intercultural and interreligious exchange and dialogue on common human practices in Dialogue Among Civilizations (2002) and Peace Talks (2004), forms part of this same cultural endeavour. In a world of interdependence, structured by forms of both liberal and non-liberal intolerance, Dallmayr focuses on concrete modes of ethical and cultural dialogue that ‘respect otherness beyond assimilation’ and resist ‘melting-pot cosmopolitanism’ (1996, p. xxii). He looks specifically to non-Western ethical practices (Confucian, Buddhist, Hindu) to retrieve an experience of the social relation that liberal individualism and liberal proceduralism threaten (2010, pp. 169–86). For both Dallmayr and Appiah, then, any viable cosmopolitanism today must practise respect of other cultures and values on the basis of a minimal common threshold of humanity and of the social relation. This kind of philosophical and cultural position explicitly frames, I would argue, postmodern IR theory, and I consider and respond to it, at the political level, and in political terms, in chapters 6 and 7.

The other type of argument I have in mind when referring to cultural cosmopolitanism is a form of reasoning made by Ulrich Beck. In his Cosmopolitan Vision (2006), for example, Beck considers globalization as ‘cosmopolitanization’, which 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 globalism and in support of a different kind of (cosmopolitan) globalization’ (2006, p. 9).² A cosmopolitan outlook responds reflexively to these processes. In contrast to the ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ of the capitalist global life-world, this outlook constitutes a reflexive affirmation of inclusive action between differences of culture and identity, one that challenges the other response to cosmopolitanization, exclusive differentiation and fundamentalism (ibid., pp. 30–3). Thus, for Beck, questions of immigration, integration and citizenship in the core liberal democracies are, above all, cosmopolitan questions because they can no longer be articulated within nation-state sociology. Methodological nationalism in both the soft and hard social sciences still identifies society with the nation-state and is thereby unable to conceive the national and the global together in a cosmopolitan vision (ibid., p. 49). Beck’s work on ‘cosmopolitisation’ has been very provocative and influential (1997, 1999, 2005, 2006). I would claim, however, that it often jumps from nationalist to cosmopolitan sociology without considered reflection on national and post-national conceptual and institutional differences. For example, when Beck argues that ‘the political union [of Europe] must be conceived as a cosmopolitan union of Europe, in opposition to the false normativity of the national’ (2006, p. 167), economic, social and political exclusions, which constitute the union of Europe in the first place, are elided. In the abstract opposition between ‘nationalist’ and ‘cosmopolitan’, the very use of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ can become rhetorical. When Beck, together with those in sociology, cultural studies and international politics who have followed in his wake, make this type of intellectual move, I consider them ‘cultural cosmopolitans’ (compare Delanty and Rumford, 2005; Rumford, 2007). Avoiding methodologically the necessity of borders, hard analysis is replaced by normative cultural vision. The vision is imaginative and troubling, but its existential modality is probably one of a culture of inclusion alone.

Both these types of reasoning (one explicit, one unintended) suggest, together, that the cultural cosmopolitan argument is important to IR when it looks to expansive horizons of understanding in order to resolve conflict in a globalized world, but that this same argument is problematic when it comes to the necessary limits of political community. This is at least my claim. Just as liberal cosmopolitanism, following Dallmayr, needs, therefore, to be complemented by cultural flexibility and tolerance, so cultural cosmopolitanism needs to be complemented by (the affirmation of) specific structures of rule, ones that have been rightly formalized by liberalism to allow for the articulation of difference. These are freedom of expression, a right to assembly, a right to participate in the public sphere and a notion of tolerance that excludes the intolerable from the public domain (practical fundamentalisms). Contemporary forms of cultural cosmopolitanism p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Spectrum of Cosmopolitanism
• 2 The Realist Critique of Cosmopolitanism
• 3 A Cosmopolitan Response to Realism
• 4 The Marxist Critique of Cosmopolitanism
• 5 A Cosmopolitan Response to Marxism
• 6 The Postmodern Critique of Cosmopolitanism
• 7 A Cosmopolitan Response to Postmodernism
• Conclusion: Idealism and Realism Today
• References
• Index