Global Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Futures?

Philosophy Today, 2019

Kant bequeaths to the present discourse of cosmopolitanism the question of how a constitutionalized global order without a world state is possible. At the core of the matter is what a legitimate public authority as the necessary enactor of the cosmopolitan sovereignty is. Habermas’s answer that this is a three-tiered, networked realm of public authority is a plausible one. The key to Habermas’s answer is the concept of a political constitution for a pluralist world. If such a constitution is possible, I believe that we need a new concept of constitution as a body politic of norms, statute laws, common laws, legal precedents, and international treaties; on this point, we should take the UK constitution as the paradigm and recognize that since the end of World War II, such a body politic of norms, statute laws, common laws, legal precedents, and international treaties of the global human community has been emerging.

The starting point of this chapter is a criticism of Doyle and his interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy. In the first section, I argue that Kant’s claim in the first definitive article is different from Doyle's reading as well as methodologically complex. I distinguish between Kant's pragmatic argument (his democratic peace proposition) and his a priori or transcendental claim. Both are distinct from Doyle's interpretation, which emphasizes above all institutional restraint and shared cultural norms. The second section presents an alternative and I hope more convincing interpretation of the first definitive article. My main argument against Doyle is that he takes Kant’s transcendental claims as statements that can be verified empirically. I propose that we drop Doyle's juxtaposition of liberal and illiberal as a fallacy of essentialism. Kant's distinction between republican and despotic regimes is a methodological abstraction belonging to ideal theory (the system of rights). Kant favours an inclusive global federation as a first step, offering legal as well as pragmatic considerations. Kant's political philosophy is dynamic. States and their constitutions can be located along a continuum stretching from entities that have not left or have returned to the state of nature to the a priori ideal of a republic. In his tentative and reflective philosophy of history, Kant reconstructs history as a dynamic process where political communities move, or ought to move, from deficient forms of statehood towards the ideal. Kant cannot simply be labelled a ‘liberal’, but should be situated between the natural right tradition, continental republicanism and early modern contractarian liberalism, integrating elements of all these traditions into his political theory. Accepting that a republic does not only depend on just political institutions but also on the moral character of its citizens, and asserting that humans have to fulfil their vocation, Kant hoped that the republican constitution would gradually foster a cosmopolitan mode of thought (Denkungsart) and a cosmopolitan disposition (Gesinnung). In this dynamic political process with moral ramifications but no direct link to world peace, the public sphere and publicity are central. Liberal interpreters like Doyle tend to overlook the importance of formation (Bildung) in Kant’s political philosophy, and its emphasis on the enlarged way of thinking that has to be cultivated (this is a revised version of my 2001 Piece)

In the following essay, I attempt to reactualize some of Kant's most fundamental concepts of a state's sovereignty and the legitimacy of the cosmopolitan order. To this end, I provide what appears as a viable solution to Kant's " sovereignty dilemma " ; that is, the reconciliation between state sovereignty and the enforceability of international laws by international institutions. I consider that a key component of the overall Kantian cosmopolitan project is the role played by the transcendental notion of an " originally united will " in its validation of constituencies. I emphasize the view that for Kant state-citizens are also, as he says, " citizens of the world " (Weltbürger) or " citizens of the earth " (Erdbürger). I argue, furthermore, that a state's sovereignty must comply with a number of different constitutional wholes. I then proceed by confronting the Kantian notion of a general united will with the Habermasian conception of " double sovereignty ". I conclude by suggesting a fusion/synthesis between the two views, which would require endorsing the idea of cosmopolitan constitutionalism as a meta-framework for interpreting the legitimacy of member states' compliance with policy indications of transnational constituencies. §1 Kant's Sovereignty Dilemma The Kantian view on the legitimacy of the state cannot be disembodied from the international and cosmopolitan dimension of public law. Yet, prima facie, these sources of obligation generate a dialectical tension between the domestic right of state-citizens (citoyens)1 and the international and even cosmopolitan level of the rights of people as a " right of citizens of the 1

Routledge, 2020

Why Kant’s global politics raises so much attention nowadays both in law and philosophy? The reason is that we need an in-depth insight in order to understand the complexities of our current legal-institutional arrangements. This monograph highlights the potential fruitfulness of Kant’s cosmopolitan thought for contemporary political thinking. It adopts a double methodological strategy. On the one hand, it reconstructs a genealogical conceptual journey showing the shaping-up of international law; on the other hand, it introduces an interpretation of cosmopolitanism centered on Kant’s theory of a metaphysics of freedom. The result is a novel highlight on Kant’s notion of the world (state) republic. Rather than considering such political entity as something empirically realizable, the hypothesis defended in this book is that the world (state) republic stands as a way of thinking international politics. It follows that the possibility of progression towards peace would result from a regulative use of the idea of a world (state) republic.

2014

Kantian Review, 1998

Kant's unduly neglected concept of cosmopolitan law suggests a third sphere of public law -- in addition to constitutional law and international law -- in which both states and individuals have rights, and where individuals have these rights as ‛citizens of the earth' rather than as citizens of particular states. I critically examine Kant's view of cosmopolitan law, discussing its addressees, content, justification, and institutionalization. I argue that Kant's conception of ‛world citizenship' is neither merely metaphorical nor dependent on an ideal of a world-government. Kant's views are particularly relevant in light of recent shifts in international law, shifts that lead away from the view that individuals can only be subjects of international law insofar as they are citizens of particular states. Thereby, a category of rights has emerged that comes close to what Kant understands by cosmopolitan law.

Revista de Ciências Jurídicas, 2022

Kant’s Staatsrecht in his “Metaphysics of Morals” likely represents the sharpest analysis and critique of democratic modernity after 1789. At the same time, it provides a unique outlook on the future of modern representative democracy. This has gone largely unnoticed, with scholars often lamenting the problematic nature of the late text, blamed either on the author’s supposed senility or on the inscrutable composition resulting from confusion during the printing process. Rather than affirming these readings, I will argue that they are merely attempts to wrestle with the brilliance of Kant’s philosophical rhetoric. Through a new reading of a key passage in the Staatsrecht, I substantiate this claim by reconstructing Kant’s late account of representative democracy and its future.

Kant Studien, 2016

The first part of this paper analyzes Kant's remarks on state forms. It is true that Kant uses the term " democracy " in a pre-modern sense, denoting a radical form of despotic sovereignty that is incompatible with representative government and the separation of powers. In addition, he makes clear that it is only in non-ideal conditions that the provisional standards of republican legitimacy are less stringent than those that apply in ideal circumstances. These qualifications notwithstanding, the first part concludes that Kant fails to consider a satisfying conception of democratic sovereignty. In the remainder of this paper, I first develop this criticism in terms of the neglect of procedural (in contrast to substantive) criteria of republican legitimacy in Kant: a public norm's norma-tive status is determined, partly but necessarily, by the procedures that led to its enactment. Second, I show that the multifarious aspects of the one innate right of humanity (independence, equality, the duty of rightful honor, etc.) provide sufficient grounds for identifying democratic procedures as non-optional features of a Kantian republic. Moreover, that the non-optionality of democratic sovereignty, on the one hand, and the validity of the normative limits put on democratic procedures and their outcomes in the form of individual rights, on the other, rest in the same normative source (viz. innate right) presents a promising way to overcome problems concerning the idea of democratic authority.

Global Constitutionalism, 2019

This article articulates legal and practical discourse that seek to apply and extend the classic cosmopolitan ideals of Immanuel Kant to the evolving practice and reality of the twenty-first century. It identifies five major strands through which cosmopolitan law ideals express themselves in contemporary constitution-making, forming in turn the major composite cosmopolitan contents. In some sense, the proposed framework re-imagines Kant in the twenty-first century, mirroring a conjoined classic and contemporaneous concept of cosmopolitan constitutionmaking. Kantian cosmopolitanism is reinterpreted by way of conjoining the classic cosmopolitan moral and normative principles of universal freedom, human worth and global justice to emerging and actual contemporaneous constitution-making trends such as using international or comparative foreign models as a basis for constitutional design, using international law and foreign domestic law in national constitutional interpretation, or using regional or international bodies of adjudication and their jurisprudence as a constitutionally mandated source of law. The outlined framework seeks to transcend the occasional historical setbacks and sceptical objections to cosmopolitanism, while admitting their continuous, albeit gradually unobtrusive presence. This framework is naturally predisposed to be deferential to a bold imaginative project, such as the one embodied in the Kantian vision of cosmopolitanism, which is both rooted in and survived the historical forces that ran contrary to the cosmopolitan ideals, to reach a point of its ever closer materialisation.