Canto Sperber PDF

November 25, 2005 Time: 05:40pm Canto-Sperber.
tex
the normative foundations of
cosmopolitanism*
by Monique Canto-Sperber
I
I
n the famous concluding lines of Paix et Guerre entre les
nations, which was published in the early sixties, Raymond
Aron emphasized the idea that hostility, which is natural between
men, can be submitted to rules only within a political unit.
In such a situation, hostile relationsinsurmountable between
menare exported and transferred to a higher level: If one
posits, he concludes, a worldwide organization which, by
denition, would no longer have any external enemies, it would,
in this case, be broken up by the play of internal conicts.
1
A
few lines further, one nds this prophetic statement: Under the
tutelage of a planetary state, groups will never live in peace.
Raymond Arons conclusions are based on three theses:
(1) Civil peace and political autonomy are accessible only
within a closed totality, which denes itself by opposing
all that is not itself.
(2) If ever there were to be a civil peace that could rise
to a global scale, a sort of perpetual peace between all
nations, it would be of the same nature as domestic civil
peace within each nation.
(3) A global community, for which by denition there is no
exterior, would re-inject hostility into its own midst.
At the time when Raymond Aron formulated this analysis, he
was caught in a bipolar vision of the world, nourished by the
reality of the Cold War. Most importantly, Raymond Aron, in
his remarks, in no way anticipated the importance that would
be taken on by the ideas of international society and global
1. Raymond Aron, Paix et guerre entre les nations (Paris: Calmann-L evy, 1963),
p. 740.
*Meeting of the Aristotelian Society, held in Senate House, University of London,
on Monday 9 May 2005 at 4.15 p.m.
November 25, 2005 Time: 05:40pm Canto-Sperber.tex
monique canto-sperber
governance which have so forcefully armed themselves since
the 1990s.
In spite of these shortcomings, Raymond Arons remarks are
nevertheless a good starting point from which to approach moral
ideals for international relations. I shall argue that, contrary to
what is usually believed, not only are the cosmopolitan ideal
and the ideal of perpetual peace two distinct ideals, but they
are most probably incompatible as well. The triumph of the
cosmopolitan ideal, far from inaugurating the denitive reign
of peace, would probably plunge us into a state where wars are
inevitable. Moreover, these wars will not just be waged by a
plurality of conicting states, but they will emerge from a new
context, the worrisome condition of anomia in which the identity-
based claims of groups will be deployed. I wish here to refute the
conceptual link so often established between global government,
cosmopolitanism, planetary democracy and perpetual peace.
I shall rst discuss the normative foundations of cosmopo-
litanism and of the ideal of perpetual peace. I shall then argue
that cosmopolitanism carries within it the threat of war. To
conclude, I would like to sketch out the possibility of a moral
ideal for international relations in the light of two obvious facts:
the existence of an international society, which imposes norms,
and the fact that causes of violence have in no way disappeared
from todays world.
II
The Normative Foundations of the Cosmopolitan Ideal. The moral
pretension of contemporary cosmopolitanism is linked to the
goal of building an international order that is not constructed
from states but that is immediately predicated on a world
scale. The Greek root kosmosworldpresent in the term
cosmopolitanism is a clear indication. Cosmopolitanism does
not seek to gradually internationalize institutions that were
originally state-controlled, nor does it seek to progressively
extend to all states agreements concluded between certain
individual states. On the contrary, cosmopolitanism denes from
the outset objectives for all the citizens of the entire earth.
Cosmopolitanism is an undertaking that stems from men and
their activities and eventually reaches the scale of world realities.
266
normative foundations of cosmopolitanism
States are but one stage on this path, but are neither a starting
point nor a decisive moral stake. One is a citizen of the world,
cosmopolit` es, before being a citizen of a state. If there is a
juridical and political order for the world, it must be dened from
the start on a planetary scale and not extrapolated from states.
Cosmopolitanism can be embodied on a world scale in
dierent political forms. It can inspire a project for global
government, a federation of states, an international democracy
or radical forms of international governance. In that sense, the
cosmopolitan option is a challenge to the present state of the
world still founded, even if it is in a slightly modied way, upon
the principle of sovereignty.
The cosmopolitan outlook goes back to antiquity.
2
It devel-
oped in the midst of ancient Stoicism when the Macedonian Em-
pire, from the fourth century bc onward, imposed itself upon the
entire known world. Macedonian domination brought the reign
of the autonomous Greek city to an end. Henceforth, in order
to achieve political goals, one needed to aim (beyond individual
cities) at the global city, locus of the human political community.
Medieval cosmopolitanism was as religious and political as it
was moral. It produced the philosophical and political equivalent
of a unied Christian faith that extended throughout Western
Europe. It was also more radical than ancient cosmopolitanism,
since it presupposed an attachment to a common set of beliefs.
But it was also more limited, since it extended only to the
Christian world. Medieval cosmopolitanism was destroyed by
the spread of the humanist and republican ideal of the sixteenth
century and then by the triumph of the principle of sovereignty
in the seventeenth century.
The cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment, which from the
eighteenth century on would become dominant within the
framework of the system of states, was much more moderate
than its ancient or medieval predecessors. Projects for perpetual
peace ourished during the eighteenth century. That of the
Abbot of Saint-Pierre, published in 1713, was abundantly
commented upon and taken up by numerous contemporary
philosophers, especially by Kant.
2. D. Heater, World Citizenship and Government: Cosmopolitan Ideas in the History
of Western Thought, London: Macmillan, 1966.
267
It is commonly held that Kants political theory was a
kind of cosmopolitanism, more or less equivalent to Kants
ideal of perpetual peace. The confusion between both ideals
of cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace arises mainly from
this belief. But it would be misleading to consider that
Kants cosmopolitanism was in any way similar to todays
cosmopolitanism.
The basic tenet of Kants cosmopolitanism is that peace
depends on the creation of a union of states, regulated by laws
(also of a cosmopolitan sort) which would apply to the whole
earth. This is a cosmopolitanism built upon the universality of
moral law, on rules of sincerity, publicity, and the respect for the
relations between states. It is also related to a wish for universal
hospitality of which everyone may partake.
3
But Kantian cosmopolitanism is barely worthy of the name
cosmopolitanism in so far as it is based on the idea that all
human societies are organized into state-controlled communities.
It advocates neither unity of the human race nor world
citizenship.
4
It is a cosmopolitanism built up from states
and that advocates the development of a legal public order.
5
Kant is a moral cosmopolitan, but not a cosmopolitan in the
internationalist sense that the term implies today.
3. The right to hospitality signies the right of any stranger not be treated like
an enemy in a country where he arrives. This is why peoples are members of a
universal and cosmopolitan community founded upon the principle of a violation of
law in one place on earth is felt everywhere, says Kant in The Project of Perpetual
Peace. For a radical interpretation of hospitality, see J. Derrida, De lHospitalit e,
Paris: Calmann-L evy, 1997, and Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un eort!,
Paris: Galil ee, 1997. See the critique of Brian Barry, International Society from a
Cosmopolitan Perspective, in D. R. Mapel and T. Nardin (eds), International Justice:
Diverse Ethical Perspectives, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 14464;
Ryoa Chung, LH eritage kantien en ethique internationale: le paradigme cosmopolite,
Biblioth` eque Nationale du Canada, 2001.
4. One must mention, nonetheless, the exceptions: Anacharsis Cloots, La R epublique
universelle ou adresse aux tyrannicides, Oeuvres, Munich: Kraus, 1980.
5. The cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment has been the object of lively critiques.
One reproached it for postulating a dominant common culture and for ignoring that
human beings must rst and foremost belong to particular communities, such as the
family, civil society and especially states, in order to constitute autonomous moral
individuals; see David Miller, The Ethical Signicance of Nationality, Ethics, 88,
July 1988, pp. 64762; Michael Walzer, The Moral Standing of States: A Reply to
Four Critics, Philosophy and Public Aairs, 9, 1980, pp. 20929; Mitchell Cohen,
Rooted Cosmopolitanism, in N. Mills (ed.), Legacy of Dissent, New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1994.
268
Todays cosmopolitanism is very dierent from the forms of
cosmopolitanism mentioned above. It calls for government by
rules and by international laws.
6
It postulates a rational entente
and a common will which are operative for the whole planet.
It is based on the concern, most natural at the beginning of
the twenty-rst century, for responsibility on a world scale.
Once more, contemporary cosmopolitanism is not built up
from a concerted eort by states, but results from international
institutions and social forces that have become independent from
states.
The ethical ambition of cosmopolitanism has been clearly
expressed by J urgen Habermas: dierent peoples belong to
dierent political groups; the state is only one among them.
Citizenship depends in part on nationality, but is not limited to
it.
7
Such a cosmopolitan ideal could take on a moderate form,
like that of Habermas, in the text to which I just referred, or a
radical and striking form, as it is the case in the works of Jacques
Derrida or Gorgio Agamben, or in the recent writings of Daniel
Archibugi and David Held.
8
The guiding principle that underlies the cosmopolitan ideal
is that the world is gradually becoming a shared world: from
above, thanks to international institutions, but especially from
below, owing to increased internationalization of the economy,
migratory ows and cultural homogenization. The cosmopolitan
ideal is also nurtured by the aspiration to a shared culture in
relation to which particularistic demands, nationalisms and the
rejection of a universal lifestyle are seen as manifestations of
another age, doomed to dissolve in the course of history.
Todays cosmopolitanism is also a political project. It calls
for a global organization founded upon international institutions
which guarantees individuals rights and proposes norms for
their activities (from rules of competition to property rights).
6. See also J. Bohman and M. Lutz-Bachmann (eds), Perpetual Peace: Essays on
Kants Cosmopolitan Ideal, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
7. J urgen Habermas, in C. Cronin and P. De Grei (eds), The Inclusion of the Other,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, pp. 11517.
8. David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to
Cosmopolitan Governance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995; David Held
and Daniel Archibugi, Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
269
But cosmopolitanism also attempts to dene the principle of a
power capable of deciding on world aairs but that would not
have states as its source.
The hope for a world democracy, which is the political
watchword of contemporary cosmopolitanism, meets this
ambition. Such a hope is supported by the conviction that power
must be given back to all those who are partners in a global
reality, the stakeholders in a common planet. The belief that a
world citizenry exists which should be capable of being politically
represented in a unied way on a world scale is at the heart of the
cosmopolitan ideal. The international institutions put into place
by states are legitimate only to the extent that they come directly
from the citizens of the world. You are G8, we are 6 billions!
cried the protesters in Genoa in the summer of 2001. This is
one of the slogans of contemporary cosmopolitanism. We, the 6
billions constitute a form of world constituency thanks to which
one could truly say that any human being is a world citizen. It
is only by obtaining the votes of such a world constituency that
international organizations can be rendered legitimate.
The fundamental creed of political cosmopolitanism is that a
democratic practice (brought directly to individuals and founded
upon human rights and the ethical demands of world civil so-
ciety) will result from the active participation of the world civil
and economic society (national and international organizations,
networks, social movements, professional organizations, cooper-
atives, NGOs, global and third-sector educational movements).
It would rely on representatives of transnational interests and
upon institutions that organize forms of world political partici-
pation, such as the European Parliament on a world scale, or the
Italian Association for Peace. It aims to act for the world without
acting through states, by provoking, by means of the media, the
reaction of world public opinion, its anger and compassion.
9
But world democracy is not like political democracy, it is more
a democracy of civil society and individuals. Intended to make
the voices of individuals heard on world problems, it is rst and
9. Jan Aart Scholte, Global Civil Society: Changing the World?, Centre for Study of
Globalization and Regionalization, Warwick Paper no. 31/99, University of Warwick,
May 1999.
270
foremost a democracy of expression where everyone can give
his or her opinion. It is, moreover, an irenic democracy which
implicitly expects individuals interests to end up in agreement
as soon as they are no longer sidetracked by the partiality of
states.
Cosmopolitanism has in its favour an obvious moral
familiarity very much in keeping with certain features of the
contemporary world: an open universe with citizens who are free
to circulate, with the entire planet as their home, capable of
extending and creating together, beyond states, a shared and
pacied reality.
10
Given that states are commonly held responsible for world
disorder, the wish to limit their role to the benet of individuals
and societies possesses an immediate moral credit. Moreover,
the wish for a homogeneous culture founded upon the rights
of man and transnationality has an obvious ethical signicance.
As for the idea of a world democracy, how can we resist its
moral valuation? Common norms founded upon the pacied
rationality of exchanges, the universality of values and cultural
homogeneity, the absorption of the question of power by the
institution of a world citizenry, such are the moral guarantees of
cosmopolitanism.
The cosmopolitan ideal was exceptionally vigorous during
the 1990s. The end of the Cold War gave rise to the hope
that once we had gone away from bipolarity, the world would
naturally evolve towards world cooperation.
11
Even though the
events that have occurred since then, especially the attack of
September 11 and the war in Iraq, have raised doubts about the
plausibility of such an ideal, the conviction still remains that,
today, cosmopolitanism is the only acceptable moral ideal for
international relations. It is a moral ideal by default. But none
of its moral claims is granted, it seems to me, as I shall argue
later on.
10. Richard Falk, Human Rights Horizon: The Pursuit of Justice in a Globalizing
World, New York: Routledge, 2000; Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
11. Martha Nussbaum et al., Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism, The Boston Review,
OctoberNovember 1994, and Theory, Culture and Society and Public Culture;
T. Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997.
271
III
The Normative Foundations of the Ideal of Perpetual Peace.
In the 1990s, when the cosmopolitan idea was rapidly taking
o, another hope emerged which was related to a form of
perpetual peace. The end of the Cold War, especially its
peaceful end, momentarily left the impression that it took
with it all the causes of conict. After the Gulf War in 1991,
President Bush praised the pacied world order. The conditions
which carried war within themselves as a cloud carries a storm
seemed ready to disappear forever. This conviction was based
on the end of the logic of blocs and systems of alliances, and
on the assumption that everyone wanted to live in freedom
and prosperity, with individuals arming their rights and
aspiring to peace. People believed that the world status quo was
about to enter a peaceful period, a period without upheavals,
without crises, without conicts. International relations would
henceforth be non-violent, non-aggressive, and result exclusively
from persuasion and pressures capable of protecting peace.
History seemed to oer the concrete realization of perpetual
peace.
The normative foundations of the ideal of perpetual peace
have in their favour the privilege of being obvious. They rest
not only on a piece of evidencethat war can no longer serve
as a solution or method of resolving conicts to the extent that
international institutions are supposed to have pre-empted the
use of violencebut also on an analysis that concludes that
the causes of war have been progressively eliminated. At the
base of this ideal, we nd several theses:
(1) The thesis that violent, predatory and aggressive
passions are no longer appropriate in the world, that
they have been denitively replaced by calmer passions
which encourage cooperation.
(2) The thesis that since states are increasingly interdepen-
dent, a consequence of internationalization will be
a progressive homogenization which will result in a
pacication of exchanges and interactions.
(3) The thesis that the causes of war are always related
to special or particular concerns of states. The fact
that distinct states exist, each one actuated by dierent
272
interests and passions, blocks access to the general
interest and remains an endemic cause of conict. The
necessary condition for attaining perpetual peace is thus
the dilution of the particularity of states. This belief
leads to the assumption of a conceptual link between
the idea of a global government, which is at the heart
of cosmopolitanism, and the ideal of perpetual peace.
Peace can only be acquired if states are surpassed or left
behind.
This hope for perpetual peace was dispelled by recent events.
Conicts (most often domestic conicts) have multiplied since the
end of the Gulf War. The European Balkans have been ravaged
by war. At least twice, the Western powers have intervened
militarily in Kosovo and Iraq with considerable means and
in circumstances which appeared to threaten world peace. The
debates over the necessity of acting with violence and employing
force are more heated than ever.
In addition to this, the September 11 attack seemed clearly
to indicate that world progress toward cultural homogenization
(often supercial), towards an internationalization of exchanges,
and towards shared institutions, is no guarantee for peace. On
that day, the link between a world that was moving toward
internationalization and pacication through a surpassing of
states and the disappearance of conicts was shattered. First
of all, the attack clearly revealed the strength of hateful
passions, the violence of the rejection of globalization and
cultural homogenization. It revealed the ardour, quite intact, of
particularism. Following September 11, it was necessary to admit
that economic and cultural unication gives rise to as much
discord as peace. The illusion that everyone could feel at home
anywhere in the world was shattered by the fact that the attack
was understood as a confrontation between two cultures, two
religions, showing that the hope for a global, unied culture is
implausible. Moreover, the reactions following the attack made it
clear that states are still viewed as the main international actors.
Even if the aggressor was not a state, the event was said to be
an act of war and not a crime, indicating thus that the victim
was a state and not a group of individuals. The initiative of
riposte was incumbent upon the United States, which had been
273
attacked, and not upon international institutions, much less upon
the community of world citizens.
IV
Why the Cosmopolitan Ideal Seems Incompatible With the Ideal
of Perpetual Peace. I would now like to sketch several arguments
that refute, in my view, the link between the cosmopolitan ideal
and guaranteed peace.
(1) The rst argument is a historical-anthropological one. In
the fth century bc, Thucydides was already pointing up the
emergence of moments of pestilence, as he put it, such as the
murderous madness of Corcyra which was to spread to the entire
Greek world.
12
These remarks attest to the irreducible force of
passions, the very ones that Hobbes and Rousseau put forward
as the basic argument for the necessity for a political order.
These passions that express the disorder of the social state, as
Rousseau put it, and which call for an establishment of political
institutions capable of pacifying them, are, rst and foremost, the
passions related to other people, that is, the passions that result
spontaneously from interactions, comparisons and exchanges
between human beings. If we wish to learn something from
these analyses, one must admit that in a world characterized
by internationalism and sharing, such passions are still around
and alive. Resentment, the armation of specic identities which
are unleashed upon the world today should appear as something
Hobbes and Rousseau would have considered a natural result
of the unication of the world. The sharing promised by
cosmopolitanism gives rise not only to reconciliation but to
rivalries and conicts too.
(2) Another argument is cultural. Cosmopolitanism inevitably
generates particularistic reactions for it carries within it a
project for cultural homogenization. The will to homogenize
often calls forth negative reactions of rejection and increases
dierences, thus transforming cultural identities and solidarities
into paradoxical products of globalization.
12. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book III, LXXXI, 18.
274
Moreover, under the cover of universality, the cosmopolitan
ideal is the expression of a particular culture. It is an ideal
which comes from developed countries. The call for democracy
from a world civil society meant to eradicate conicts and to
respect international law. The hopes of a homogeneous culture
shaped by tolerance and pluralism are rst and foremost wishes
formulated by Western elites. Cosmopolitanism came out of a
Western view of the world and is supposed to be adopted by the
whole world. Cosmopolitanism is a discourse on the universal,
rooted in Western culture, and that very fact can give rise to
reactions of rejection. In that sense, it was the dark face of
cosmopolitanism, its denunciatory and vengeful ospring that
turned up on September 11.
13
(3) A third argument is a political one. Cosmopolitanism would
like to get rid of states, which are nonetheless the only entities
that permit a moderation of violence, as Raymond Aron recalled.
Henceforth, cosmopolitanism may pave the way for an age of
perpetual war.
Modern cosmopolitanism arises out of the observation that
the time for sovereignties has passed. States are said to be
no longer capable of mastering the heterogeneity of modern
societies. They no longer command the means of treating
the problems raised by the current condition of the world:
collective security, deterioration of the planet, increasing scarcity
of resources, dramatic inequalities. That incapacity comes from
the fact that states have at their disposal a single and partial
viewpoint and are always motivated by a particular interest while
the problems of the world are of a shared nature and indierent
to frontiers.
Cosmopolitanism, moreover, believes that there is a
fundamental contradiction between sovereignty, on the one
hand, and law and justice on the other. States are seen as
obstacles on the path to global ethics. For contemporary
advocates of cosmopolitanism, we have entered a world where
states have exhausted their moral resources. No state, by
13. What is more, an open world of free commerce is also a very vulnerable world,
where criminals move about freely and where means to violence are freely accessible,
easily exchanged and reproduced. Terrorist networks take advantage of the openness
of modern societies.
275
denition riveted to particular interests, can carry, without
reservations, a moral demand that can only be universal.
Since the eradication of violence in the world is predicated
on the healing of global ills and the establishment of law,
cosmopolitanism contends that such objectives cannot be
acquired unless we go beyond states.
But this diagnosis established by cosmopolitanism seems to
me to be wrong. First of all, far from being an obstacle to
the resolution of global ills, states and international cooperation
between states oer the only means to work out solutions.
Furthermore, the realization of the cosmopolitan ideal may
aggravate the ills that are the causes of today violence.
First, states are not at the origin of the ills of the world any
more than they are at the origin of the internationalization of
exchanges. Rather, it is individuals, communities, multinational
corporations, that are responsible for both globalization and
the deterioration of the environmental situation of the planet.
It is certain that governments are often reluctant to impose rules
or restrictions on their citizens and on their corporations in
matters of energy consumption, for example. Sometimes they
are afraid of being unpopular, especially when citizens of other
states are not subject to similar constraints. But the principal
obstacle on the path to common resolutions on environmental
matters is not the state, but individuals and economic actors.
There is something absurd about believing that if the business
activity of the world was entrusted to a community of citizens,
the administration of global ills would be carried out in a
non-contested and peaceful way, whereas it is the so-called
citizens of the world who are themselves largely responsible
for the inertia of governments in environmental matters. It is
thus an illusion to pretend that a world gathering of citizens
could reach an easy agreement and would spontaneously decide
to impose limits to foster the common good of the universe.
To turn to the generosity of the citizens of the world to
bring about a more just and therefore more peaceful world is
wishful thinking.
14
To dream of replacing states by other, largely
imaginary sources, would be tantamount to depriving ourselves
14. Even if one can observe global solidarity in the case of exceptional catastrophes,
as with the tsunami that ravaged the coast of the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004.
276
of existing sources of solidarity, largely dependent upon those
states.
Second, the realization of the cosmopolitan ideal will in no
way help us to reduce conicts. There is no reason to imagine
that individuals will abandon their individual preferences and
renounce the promotion of their interests the instant they are
citizens of a global and no longer merely national democracy.
What is more, the idea that the juxtaposition of divergent
interests within the framework of a global democracy will
magically give rise to harmony to the benet of altruistic and
benecent interests is an illusion. The current competition for
access to international funds by NGOs gives every reason to
doubt this.
In order to control violence, limit conicts and decide between
interests, some deciding power must exist. But such a power is
only legitimate to the extent that it expresses the sovereign will
of a closed political entity. We will nd no equivalent to this
in a global democracy. The political community within such a
structure would be, by denition, without limits. There is no
political subject on a world scale. There is thus no collective will
capable of legitimizing a global power. None of the resources
of legitimacy required to reach a legitimate decision or initiate
a legitimate action are to be found there.
The global democracy proposed by cosmopolitanism would
thus be incapable of resolving the global problems that cause
violence such as the increasing inequality between North and
South, the deterioration of the environment, and security threats.
In order to deal with these problems, measures are required
that would inevitably infringe upon powerful interests, which
a global democracy, lacking real legitimacy, would be powerless
to counter. In other words, cosmopolitanism would put us in
a situation in which there would be no hope for a solution to
global ills. Consequently, sources of conict would be reinforced.
(4) A fourth argument is related to the use of violence. It is an
illusion to think that perpetual peace can be attained by merely
evoking rights and individuals, without including a reection on
action, power, violence and force. No perpetual peace is possible
without deterrence, without the threat of using force. But in
order to control force and limit violence, states remain necessary,
277
for the conditions of peaceful competition and exchange are
guaranteed above all by states.
15
In most of the writings devoted to contemporary cosmopoli-
tanism, the question as to how global democracy will reach the
conditions that will enable a legitimization of the use of force
is obscured if not completely put aside. Is it not paradoxical to
ask of a global democracy, which possesses no consensual and
legitimate power, to wage war or to limit violence, especially
when cooperation between states is still incapable of doing so?
Moreover, cosmopolitanism proposes nothing that could take
the place of the capacity of states to control internal violence,
to protect rights and liberties, and to organize international
cooperation.
(5) One last argument has to do with the preservation of the
conditions for international agency. The reality of democracy is
related to the very existence of a political community, and thus to
an inevitably limited principle of power. If this principle becomes
illimited and is deployed on a world scale, there is every reason to
fear that the world assemblies recommended by cosmopolitanism
will be either impotent or frightening.
16
In a global democracy,
no force of opposition can exist. Only the state, by denition
limited and one among many, can insure the concrete exercise of
freedom to act. The only hope for preserving liberty would be
if the powers of such an organization were virtuous and speaking
for virtuous peoples. But such a postulate in regard to the
morality of actors and institutions is an illusion. Besides, if
cosmopolitanism must be based on the hypothetical virtue of
citizens and peoples of the world in order to guarantee its moral
pretensions, it has nothing by itself to commend it as a moral
ideal.
15. Defenders of cosmopolitanism call for states on a local level to control
heterogeneity and to preserve order, thereby recognizing that only the states can
fulll these functions. But at the same time, they disqualify states from dealing with
these issues on an international level.
16. In his essay on the Project for a Perpetual Peace, J urgen Habermas emphasizes
that Kants reticence in relation to global government had historical underpinnings
(La Paix perp etuelle: Le bicentenaire dune id ee kantienne, Paris: Le Cerf, 1996, 74, pp.
7789). It would seem nonetheless that Kants reticence was not related to reasons
of the time, but to a link between the plurality of states and the preservation of
liberty.
278
V
Which Global Moral Ideal? The moral signicance of an ideal
for the world is attached to its capacity to remedy global
ills, to reduce inequalities, to moderate violence and to allow
real international action (for example, in case of humanitarian
disasters). Cosmopolitanism is decient on these three points.
It does not provide a framework which allows access to the
formation of common interest and shared will. It does not bestow
legitimacy to organize international transfers of wealth running
counter to individuals preferences. It maintains competition and
rivalry. A cosmopolitan state of the world is not a guarantee
for perpetual peace but is likely to harbour renewed causes for
conict.
Most of international initiatives up to now have been imposed
by states and by the union of states. The special access that states
give to the perception of world problems supplies the basis upon
which we can build a common point of view. The very idea of
the common good presupposes a diversity of perspectives which
will allow us to reach such a common outlook.
17
The existence of an international regime of human rights is
due exclusively to the action of states. It was the governments
of states that progressively installed the only international
constraints that exist today in this domain. They came to an
agreement in order to create the European Court of Human
Rights and the International Criminal Court. It is essentially
in the democratic and liberal states, or in state unions of this
sort, such as Europe, that human rights are defended today.
It is thus absurd to consider that justice and rights must be,
a priori and exclusively, positioned on an international level,
whereas immoralities, abuses and crimes would only be national.
Human rights can be dened at the international level, but their
defence is carried out mainly by states or some union of states.
The reticence of certain states when faced with the reality of an
17. Condorcet was one of the rst critics of the plurality of states in the name of
universalism. Whereas Montesquieus political philosophy ardently defends the moral
benets of a plurality of states, Condorcet disagrees: One does not see why all the
provinces of a state, or even all states, should not have the same criminal laws, the
same civil laws, the same commercial laws, etc. A good law must be good for all men,
just as a true proposition is true for all. Observation sur le 29 eme livre de lEsprit des
lois, Oeuvres compl` etes, Didot, 1847, Vol. 1, Ch. XVIII.
279
international system of justice in most cases does not signify a
refusal to take human rights into account.
18
The moral resources of states are not conned to particular
territories. They are partially exportable. The international
institutions, put into place via agreements between governments,
can call on the morality of states. It is certain that these
institutions enjoy moral credit owing to the fact that they result
from an agreement, from the building of a common interest and
a collective will. But to the extent that the moral legitimacy of
such institutions depends on the consent of states, it is clear that
states remain at their source, as the active principle of legitimacy.
If one does without states, is one not at risk of losing what one
has, that is, the major principle of moral legitimacy that can
be applied to international institutions, without having much to
substitute for it?
Certainly, state action when faced with global problems is now
still at a level well below present requirements. The line of action
that is necessary for anyone who is concerned with the world to
come is thus to put on pressure, within ones own state, so that
it may commit itself more completely to programs of governance
and solidarity, since the international agreements states conclude
constitute the best means of action today. In challenging this
possibility, cosmopolitanism deprives us of a guaranteed moral
resource, based on states or cooperation between states, without
truly allowing the construction of a viable replacement.
The ideal of perpetual peace seems obvious as a moral ideal.
However, such an ideal involves complexities and ambiguities.
18. The US government in 2002 was against the ratication of the Treaty of Rome
which created the International Criminal Court, whereas President Clinton was at the
origin of the project to establish such a Court. The reasons for American hostility,
however, have nothing to do with lack of concerns for human rights. The US assumed
that it has at its disposal democratic courts capable of judging more eciently its
nationals than an international court, made up of many states, some of which are
hardly democratic. It also feared lawsuits that would incriminate American citizens
for ideological reasons. Finally, several American jurists managed to impose an
interpretation of sovereignty according to which the rights and duties of citizens
are dependent only on national law and in no case on international law, which must
uniquely regulate relations between states. It is thus especially in the name of a
particular interpretation of international law that the US is against the International
Criminal Court, and not in order to push the rights of states over human rights.
D. B. Rivkin and L. Casey, The Rocky Shoals of International Law, The National
Interest, 62, 2000/2001, pp. 3546; P. J. Spiro, The New Sovereigntists, Foreign
Aairs, 79, 2000, pp. 915.
280
Morality is not exclusively a synonym for peace, it can also carry
threats of war, in the form of pressures or deterrent actions.
But as disillusioned as we might be about such an ideal, the
least we can do is to try to get nearer to it. To this end, the
best approach is to distance ourselves from the cosmopolitan
ideal. That means borrowing from it what can be of real help
for the world to come (ideas of internationalization, universality
of human rights, global denition of problems and solutions),
but remaining critical of the illusions that this ideal carries with
it. Because the cosmopolitan ideal, far from being a guarantee
of perpetual peace, may rather be a favourable condition to
unlimited violence.
Ecole normale sup erieure
Paris
France
281

Canto Sperber PDF

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Descrizione originale:

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Canto Sperber PDF

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

November 25, 2005 Time: 05:40pm Canto-Sperber.

Potrebbero piacerti anche