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Abstract
Can states become committed and competent agents of cosmopolitan justice? The theory of ‘statist cosmopolitanism’ argues that they can: their citizens can be turned towards a commitment to cosmopolitan principles and actions by moral entrepreneurs constituting a ‘cosmopolitan avant-garde’, and can be sustained in their commitment to those principles by their pre-existing attachment to the state as a political community. Taking cosmopolitan principles as axiomatic, this paper subjects statist cosmopolitanism to critique. First, I question the scale of the transformation that a cosmopolitan avant-garde can engender given the complexity of the causal chains the avant-garde seek to elucidate, as well as the countervailing potency of the state itself which reinforces particularistic attitudes in its citizens. Second, I argue that even if, contra my preceding argument, the cosmopolitan avant-garde were to be successful, states would find it desirable to federally integrate in order to be better able to realise their cosmopolitan commitments. Such integration is compatible with statist cosmopolitanism’s motivational theory, even if not its institutional vision. Finally, I re-characterise the cosmopolitan avant-garde as agitators for the transcendence, rather than just transformation, of the state system.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Lea Ypi for several helpful discussions, as well as the paper’s anonymous reviewers. This paper was completed while a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Justitia Amplificata’, Goethe University, Frankfurt.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I here understand cosmopolitan justice to be met when the relevant ‘distribuenda’ are distributed amongst individuals globally in a broadly egalitarian manner. I understand distribuenda widely, to potentially encompass, for example, resources, welfare, opportunities, as well as inherently relational concepts like power and recognition. I defend neither a particular conception of cosmopolitan justice nor cosmopolitanism more generally – the latter is simply taken as axiomatic for the purposes of this paper.
2. This paper responds primarily to Lea Ypi’s recent thought; indeed, the phrase ‘statist cosmopolitanism’ is hers (Citation2008, Citation2011). Ypi presents the most fully worked-out positive argument for the domestic state system as a setting for the realisation of distributive cosmopolitanism. However, much of my argument here applies to any theory that wishes to appeal to the potential cosmopolitan transformation of domestic states. For instance, Ypi’s argument has similarities with Benhabib’s (Citation2006) notion of ‘democratic iteration’, as well as Lenard’s (Citation2012) reference to the expansionary egalitarian potential of democratic states. Kok-Chor Tan expresses the belief that nation-states can become good cosmopolitan citizens in his Justice Without Borders (Citation2004). For a general appeal for ‘bringing the state back in’ to cosmopolitan theorising, see Brown (Citation2011).
3. While this last addition is less obviously a global public good, there is reason to think that, for example, instability in poor countries threatens richer states’ own stability. See Weinstock (Citation2010).
4. See, for example, Ulaş (Citation2015).
5. For this type of argument see Miller (Citation2007).
6. I do not mean to suggest that either nationalist or statist theorists actually object to foreign aid. Indeed, both tend to believe that there are obligations of justice to relieve severe poverty abroad. My point is that the broad thrust of these positions – i.e. the moral relevance of the nation and/or the state to global justice – are internalised autonomously, simply in virtue of living within the nation-state system. This is true even if the nuanced specifics of those philosophical positions are not grasped in the same way.
7. Given the reality of differing state sizes, global individual equality necessarily entails interstate inequality, but that does not mean that all forms of interstate inequality translate to individual equality. My thought here is that we will see inter-state inequalities arise in a pattern that is not compatible with individual equality.
8. It is true that natural resources are often said to be a ‘curse’, as countries that depend on the export of natural resources often have authoritarian governments, are plagued by civil war, suffer low levels of growth and high levels of inequality and poverty. But as Wenar (Citation2008) points out, the ‘curse’ is a symptom of the international rules that allocate control over those resources. In a world of cosmopolitan states, we can assume that these defective rules would be corrected such that it was not possible, for example, for dictators to plunder a country’s resources for their own personal benefit.
9. Meckled-Garcia believes that the absence of a currently existing agent capable of competently and authoritatively acting upon a given distributive principle precludes that principle from being the right one. Cosmopolitans, however, do not accept such an ‘agency-based’ approach to justice. For critique of such an approach, see Valentini (Citation2011, pp. 100–107).
10. If it is relational cosmopolitanism that has been internalised, then an alternative might be a mutual commitment amongst states to cease interacting with each other (although it seems rather unlikely that this is possible).
11. For a similar suggestion see Rao (Citation2013, p. 103). I go further than Rao in suggesting more strongly that the success of the cosmopolitan avant-garde not only could but, in all likelihood, does entail the transcendence of the domestic state system. While in her 2008 article and in Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency Lea Ypi makes no mention of alternative institutional proposals, in another more recent article (Citation2013) she makes an explicit appeal to the need for ‘political cosmopolitanism’, referencing favourably recent work on global democracy. Here, the political vision of statist cosmopolitanism is more or less explicitly rejected, and Ypi highlights many of the same problems with the idea of realising global justice through state ‘voluntarism’ that I highlighted in the section ‘Arguments against states as agents of cosmopolitan justice’. However, the apparent conflict between the two cosmopolitan institutional visions is not explicitly reconciled.