Cosmopolitanism

Ideals and Realities

David Held, David Held

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745648361, 9780745648354
• eBook ISBN: 9780745659350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book sets out the case for a cosmopolitan approach to contemporary global politics. It presents a systematic theory of cosmopolitanism, explicating its core principles and justifications, and examines the role many of these principles have played in the development of global politics, such as framing the human rights regime. The framework is then used to address some of the most pressing issues of our time: the crisis of financial markets, climate change and the fallout from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In each case, Held argues that realistic politics is exhausted, and that cosmopolitanism is the new realism.

See also Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held's The Cosmopolitanism Reader.

1

Cosmopolitanism: Ideas, Realities and Deficits

The struggle over the accountability of the global economic order has been intense. Violence in Seattle, Prague, Genoa and elsewhere marked a new level of conflict about globalization, democracy and social justice. The issues which have been raised are clearly fundamental, concerned as they are with the nature of free markets, the relation between corporate and public agendas, and with the type and scope of political intervention in economic life. These matters are complex and extremely challenging, although they are not new to political debate and political analysis. What is new is the way the issues are framed, disseminated and fought over in transnational and global contexts.

In this chapter I want to draw out some of the concerns underlying these controversies by reflecting on the changing nature and form of global processes, networks and connections, and on the meaning and significance today of cosmopolitan ideas and theories. The chapter has six parts. It begins with sections on globalization and global governance and then, in the third section, traces their relevance for the locus and home of democracy, accountability and social justice. Against this background, the meaning of cosmopolitanism is set out in philosophical and institutional terms, in the fourth and fifth sections, respectively. The argument is made that not only is cosmopolitanism increasingly important to politics and human welfare, but that it ought also to be embraced further in thinking about the proper form of globalization and global governance. A final section explores some basic gaps between cosmopolitan principles and institutions that need to be overcome if cosmopolitanism is to extend its purchase on governance structures and, thus, on the conditions for greater accountability, democracy and social justice in global politics.

Globalization

Globalization has become the ‘big idea’ of our times, even though it is frequently employed in such a way that it lacks precise definition. Moreover, it is so often used in political debate that it is in danger of becoming devoid of analytical value. Nonetheless, if the term is properly formulated, it does capture important elements of change in the contemporary world which can be usefully specified further.

Globalization can best be understood if it is conceived as a spatial phenomenon, lying on a continuum with ‘the local’ at one end and ‘the global’ at the other. It implies a shift in the spatial form of human organization and activity to transcontinental or interregional patterns of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power (Held et al., 1999). Today, globalization embraces at least four distinct types of change. First, it involves a stretching of social, political and economic activities across political frontiers, regions and continents. But if these are something other than occasional or random, then something else is suggested: intensification. Thus, second, globalization is marked by the growing magnitude of networks and flows of trade, investment, finance, culture and so on. Third, globalization can be linked to a speeding up of global interactions and processes, as the evolution of worldwide systems of transport and communication increases the velocity of the diffusion of ideas, goods, information, capital and people. And, fourth, it involves the deepening impact of global interactions and processes such that the effects of distant events can be highly significant elsewhere and even the most local developments can come to have enormous global consequences. In this particular sense, the boundaries between domestic matters and global affairs become fuzzy. In short, globalization can be thought of as the widening, intensifying, speeding up and growing impact of worldwide interconnectedness.

Globalization is made up of the accumulation of links across the world’s major regions and across many domains of activity. It can be related to many factors, including the rapid expansion of the world economy. International trade has grown to unprecedented levels, both absolutely and relatively in relation to national income. Although the global financial crisis of 2008–9 has reversed trade growth in many places, the indications are that it will recover in many sectors. In comparison with the late nineteenth century – an era of rapid trade growth – export levels today (measured as a share of GDP) are much greater for OECD states. As barriers to trade have fallen across the world, global markets have emerged for many goods and, increasingly, services (ibid.: ch. 3).

The growing extensity, intensity and speed of trade have led to the increasing enmeshment of national economies with each other. Key elements of the production process are being sliced up, dispersed and located in different countries, especially in developing and emerging economies. Thus, not only do countries increasingly consume goods from abroad, but their own production processes are significantly dependent on components produced overseas. Economic activity in any one country is, accordingly, strongly affected by economic activity in other countries. Alongside transnational production networks, the power of global finance has become central to economic globalization. World financial flows have grown exponentially, especially since the 1970s. Trillions of dollars worth of financial transactions are carried out weekly across the globe. Most countries today are incorporated into rapidly growing global financial markets, although the nature of their access to these markets is markedly unequal.

Processes of economic globalization have not, however, occurred in an empty political space; there has been a shift in the nature and form of political organization as well. The sovereign state now lies at the intersection of a vast array of international regimes and organizations that have been established to manage whole areas of transnational activity (trade, financial flows, risk management and so on) and collective policy problems. The rapid growth of transnational issues has spawned layers of governance both within and across political boundaries. This has resulted in the transformation of aspects of territorially based political decision-making, the development of regional and global organizations and institutions, and the emergence of regional and global law.

The global governance complex

Global governance today has some of the characteristics of a multilayered, multidimensional and multi-actor system (see Held and McGrew, 2002a: 78–84). It is multilayered insofar as the development and implementation of global policies can involve a process of political coordination between suprastate, transnational, national and often substate agencies. Attempts to combat AIDS/HIV, for instance, involve the coordinated efforts of global, regional, national and local agencies. It is multidimensional insofar as the engagement and configuration of agencies often differs from sector to sector and issue to issue, giving rise to significantly differentiated political patterns. The politics of, for example, global financial regulation is different in significant ways from the politics of global trade regulation. Further, many of the agencies of, and participants in, the global governance complex are no longer purely intergovernmental bodies. There is involvement by representatives of transnational civil society, from Greenpeace to the Make Poverty History campaign and an array of NGOs; the corporate sector, from BP to the International Chamber of Commerce and other trade or industrial associations; and mixed public–private organizations, such as the International Organization of Security Commissions (IOSCO). Accordingly, global governance is a multi-actor complex insofar as diverse agencies participate in the development of global public policy. Of course, this broad pluralistic conception of global governance does not presume that all states or interests have an equal voice in, let alone an equal influence over, its agenda or programmes – not at all.

Another important feature of the formulation and implementation of global public policy is that it occurs within an expanding array of different kinds of networks: transgovernmental networks, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF); trisectoral networks involving public, corporate and NGO groups, such as the World Commission on Dams Forum; and transnational networks, such as the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) (McGrew, 2002; Slaughter, 2004). These networks – which can be ad hoc or institutional – have become increasingly important in coordinating the work of experts and administrators within governments, international organizations and the corporate and NGO sectors. They function to set policy agendas, disseminate information, formulate rules and establish and implement policy programmes, from the money-laundering measures of the FATF to global initiatives to counter AIDS. While many of these networks have a clear policy and administrative function, they have also become mechanisms through which civil society and corporate interests can become embedded in the global policy process (examples include the Global Water Partnership and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization). In part, the growth of these networks is a response to the overload and politicization of multilateral bodies, but it is also an outcome of the growing technical complexity of global policy issues and the communications revolution.

To this complex pattern of global governance and rule-making can be added the new configurations of regional governance. The EU has taken Europe from the edge of catastrophe in two world wars to a world in which sovereignty is pooled across a growing number of areas of common concern. For all its flaws, it is, judged in the context of the history of states, a remarkable political formation. In addition, there has been a significant acceleration in regional relations beyond Europe: in the Americas, in Asia-Pacific and, to a lesser degree, in Africa. While the forms taken by these regional governance structures are very different from the model of the EU, they have nonetheless had significant consequences for political power, particularly in the Asia-Pacific, which has seen the formation of ASEAN, APEC, ARF, PBEC and many other groupings (see Payne, 2003). Furthermore, as regionalism has deepened, so interregional diplomacy has intensified as old and new regional groups seek to consolidate their relations with each other. In this respect, regionalism has not been a barrier to globalization; it has been a building block for it (see Hettne, 1997).

At the core of all these developments is the reconfiguration of aspects of political power since 1945. While many states retain the ultimate legal claim to effective supremacy over what occurs within their own territories, this claim has to be understood in relation to the expanding jurisdiction of institutions of global and regional governance, and the constraints of, as well as the obligations derived from, new and changing forms of international regulation. This is especially evident in the European Union, but it is also evident in the operation of IGOs such as the WTO (Moore, 2003). Moreover, even where sovereignty still seems intact, states by no means retain sole command of what transpires within their own territorial boundaries. Complex global systems, from the financial to the ecological, connect the fate of communities in one locale to the fate of communities in distant regions of the world. There has, in other words, been a transformation or an ‘unbundling’ of the relationship between sovereignty, territoriality and political outcomes (see Ruggie, 1993).

This unbundling involves a plurality of actors, a variety of political processes, and diverse levels of co-ordination and operation. Specifically, it includes:

• different forms of intergovernmental arrangements embodying various levels of legalization, types of instruments utilized and responsiveness to stakeholders;
• an increasing number of public agencies, for example central bankers, maintaining links with similar agencies in other countries and, thus, forming transgovernmental networks for the management of various global issues;
• diverse business actors (i.e. firms, their associations and organizations such as international chambers of commerce) establishing their own transnational regulatory mechanisms to manage issues of common concern;
• NGOs and transnational advocacy networks (i.e. leading actors in global civil society) playing a role in various domains of global governance and at various stages of the global public policymaking process;
• public bodies, business actors and NGOs collaborating in many issue areas in order to provide novel approaches to social problems through multistakeholder networks.

There is nothing inevitable, it should be stressed, about these trends and developments. While they are highly significant to understand the nature and form of global politics, they are contingent upon many factors, and could be halted or even reversed by protracted global conflicts or cataclysmic events. Although these bodies and networks lack the kind of centralized, coordinated political programme that is associated with national governance, it would be a mistake to overlook the expanding jurisdiction and scope of global policymaking, most especially, the substantial range of issues it touches on and its growing intrusion into the domestic affairs of states.

Globalization and democracy: Five disjunctures

The world is no longer made up of relatively ‘discrete civilizations’ or ‘discrete political communities’ (Fernández-Armesto, 1995: ch. 1); rather, it is a world of overlapping communities of fate, where the fates of nations are significantly entwined. Political communities are enmeshed and entrenched in complex structures of overlapping forces, processes and networks. During the period in which the nation-state was being forged – and the territorially bounded conception of democracy was consolidated – the idea of a close mesh between geography, political power and democracy could be assumed. It seemed compelling that political power, sovereignty, democracy and citizenship were simply and appropriately bounded by a delimited territorial space. These links were by and large taken for granted, and generally unexplained in modern political theory (Held, 1995). Globalization and changes in the nature and form of global governance raise issues concerning the proper scope of democracy, or democratic jurisdiction, given that the relation between decision-makers and decision-takers is not necessarily symmetrical or congruent with respect to the territory.

The changing relation between globalization and the modern nation-state can be characterized by five disjunctures. All indicate an increase in the extensity, intensity, velocity and impact of globalization. And all suggest important questions about the evolving character of the democratic political community in particular.

First, the idea of a self-determining national collectivity – which delimits and shapes a community of fate – can no longer be simply located within the borders of a single nation-state. Many of the most fundamental, economic, social, cultural and environmental forces and processes that determine the nature of the political good and political outcomes now lie – in terms of their operation and dynamics – beyond the reach of individual polities. The current concern about genetic engineering and its possible regulation is a case in point.

Second, it can no longer be presupposed that the locus of effective political power is synonymous with national governments and the nation-state; national states and national governments are now embedded in complex networks of political power at regional and global levels (see Keohane, 1995, 2001; Rosenau, 1997, 1998). In other words, political power is shared and negotiated among diverse forces and agencies at many levels, from the local to the global. The link between effective government, self-government and a bounded territory is being broken.

Third, while significant concentrations of power are found, of course, in many states, these are frequently embedded in, and articulated with, new and changing forms of political capacity. The power and operations of national government are altering, although not all in one direction. The entitlement of states to rule within circumscribed territories – their sovereignty – is not on the edge of collapse, but the practical nature of this entitlement – the actual capacity of states to rule – is changing its shape (Held et al., 1999: Conclusion; Held, 2004). A new regime of government and governance is emerging which is displacing traditional conceptions of state power as an indivisible, territorially exclusive form of public power.

Fourth, the nurturing and enhancement of the public good increasingly requires coordinated multilateral action (e.g. to ensure security or to prevent global recessions). At the same time, the resolution of transboundary issues (e.g. responsibility for carbon omissions) may often impose significant domestic adjustments. In this respect, political and social agents are witnessing a shift in the operation and dynamics of state power and political authority. This has become most apparent as states have become locked into regional and global regimes and associations. The context of national politics has been transformed by the diffusion of political authority and the growth of multilayered governance (see Nye and Donahue, 2000).

Fifth, the distinctions between domestic and foreign affairs, internal political issues and external questions are no longer clear-cut. Governments face issues, such as the international drugs trade, AIDS, terrorism, the use of non-renewable resources, the management of nuclear waste, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and climate change, which cannot meaningfully be categorized in these terms. Moreover, issues like the location and investment strategy of MNCs, the regulation of global financial markets, the threats to the tax base of individual countries in the context of a global division of labour and the absence of capital controls all pose questions about the continued value of some of the central instruments of national economic policy. In fact, in nearly all major areas of policy, the enmeshment of national political communities in regional and global flows and processes involves them in intensive transboundary coordination and regulation.

In the context of these complex transformations, the meaning of accountability and democracy at the national level is altering. In circumstances where transnational actors and forces cut across the boundaries of national communities in diverse ways, where powerful international organizations and agencies make decisions for vast groups of people across diverse borders, and where the capacities of large companies can dwarf those of many states, the questions of who should be accountable to whom, and on what basis, do not easily resolve themselves. The mesh between geography, political power and democracy is challenged by the intensification of regional and global relations.

Cosmopolitanism: Ideas and trajectories

The problems and dilemmas of contemporary national politics, just described, can be referred to, following Jeremy Waldron, as the ‘circumstances of cosmopolitanism’ (2000: 236–9); that is, the background conditions and presuppositions which inform and motivate the case for a cosmopolitan framework of accountability and regulation. Not only are we ‘unavoidably side by side’ (as Kant put it), but the degrees of mutual interconnectedness and vulnerability are rapidly growing. The new circumstances of cosmopolitanism give us little choice but to consider the possibility of a common framework of standards and political action, given shape and form by a common framework of institutional arrangements (Held, 1995: Part III).

How should cosmopolitanism be understood in this context? There are three broad accounts of cosmopolitanism, previously mentioned, which are important to bear in mind and which contribute to its contemporary meaning (for a more detailed historical narrative, see Brown and Held, 2010: Introduction). The first was explored by the Stoics, who where the first to refer explicitly to themselves as cosmopolitans, seeking to replace the central role of the polis in ancient political thought with that of the cosmos in which humankind could live in harmony (Horstmann, 1976). The Stoics developed this thought by emphasizing that we inhabit two worlds – one that is local and assigned to us by birth and another that is ‘truly great and truly common’ (Seneca). Each person lives in both a local community and a wider community of human ideals, aspirations and argument. The basis of the latter lies in what is fundamental to all – the equal worth of reason and humanity in every person (Nussbaum, 1997: 30, 43). Allegiance is owed, first and foremost, to the moral realm of all humanity, not to the contingent groupings of nation, ethnicity and class. Deliberations and problem-solving should focus on what is common to all persons as citizens of reason and the world; collective problems can be better dealt with if approached from this perspective, rather than from the point of view of sectional groupings. Such a position does not require that individuals give up local concerns and affiliations to family, friends and fellow countrymen; it implies, instead, that they must acknowledge these as morally contingent and that their most important duties are to humanity as a whole and its overall developmental requirements.

The basic idea of classical cosmopolitanism involves the notion that each person is ‘a citizen of the world’ and owes a duty, above all, ‘to the worldwide community of human beings’ (Nussbaum, 1996: 4). While there are many difficulties with this classical formulation (for instance, its link to a teleological view of nature – see Nussbaum, 1997), the main point of the Stoics contained a most significant idea: ‘that they were, in the first instance, human beings living in a world of human beings and only incidentally members of polities’ (Barry, 1999: 36). The boundaries of polities are understood to be historically arbitrary, and most often the result of coercion and violence. Borders obscure the common circumstances of humankind and, thus, could not have the moral significance frequently ascribed to them (Pogge, 1994a: 198). The individual belongs to the wider world of humanity; moral worth cannot be specified by the yardstick of a single political community.

The second conception of cosmopolitanism was introduced in the eighteenth century when the term weltbürger (world citizen) became one of the key terms of the Enlightenment. The most important ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Introduction: Changing Forms of Global Order
• 1 Cosmopolitanism: Ideas, Realities and Deficits
• 2 Principles of Cosmopolitan Order
• 3 Cosmopolitan Law and Institutional Requirements
• 4 Violence, Law and Justice in a Global Age
• 5 Reframing Global Governance: Apocalypse Soon or Reform!
• 6 Parallel Worlds: The Governance of Global Risks in Finance, Security and the Environment
• 7 Democracy, Climate Change and Global Governance
• Afterword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• References
• Index