A political theory of cosmopolitanism that will live up to the motto ‘No One Is Illegal’ has to endorse the idea of a cosmopolitan institution. A very difficult task. I had to overcome a threefold initial reluctance. First, the reluctance to think about institutions and thus to think institutionally. Since institutions presuppose power, hierarchy, control and discipline, critically thinking theorists want to be anti-institutional and to advance arguments enhancing freedom not power and control. The second reluctance was the notorious reluctance to think about a cosmopolitan institution usually regarded as a global Leviathan. The third reluctance was conditioned by the assumption that radical cosmopolitics could not be completed by an institution without losing its ‘permanent questioning’ dimension. The motivation and the courage to go further have been found in the very protests and social movements that instantiated the concept of cosmopolitanism of dissent and which not only contested the existing institutions, but advanced institutional experiments from below. So, I ‘embarked’ on my study of the idea of a cosmopolitan institution from the institutional experimentations from the bottom up, but alone – those scholars who joined me in researching cosmopolitanism of dissent, post-foundational cosmopolitanism and migrant protests withdrew from the prospect of such a radicalisation of research. However, there was nothing heroic in that lonely scholarly stance confronting the spectre of a global Leviathan and attempting to address a set of questions: Are cosmopolitan institutions from the bottom up possible? How can the concept of an institution that would embody a post-foundational cosmopolitanism with a ‘groundless ground’ be thought about? How can cosmopolitan institutions be constructed and legitimated? Is a world state inevitable when thinking about cosmopolitan institutions?

THE INSTITUTION AS A ‘MEANING–STRUCTURE’

The first step in the confrontation with the global Leviathan was to examine the fear of institutions. Fear and distrust in institutions come from the everyday experience of institutions and functionaries that ‘populate’ them. Described as a necessary feature of modernity that brings rationalisation and efficiency to everyday life, bureaucracy permeates almost every aspect of modern life, concomitantly generating innumerable criticisms: excessive regulations and paperwork, obscure rules and procedures, hierarchies and power structures, duplicated tasks, lack of accountability, impossibility of dissent and so on (see Graeber 2015).