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Cosmopolitanism and the world state

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2013

WILLIAM E. SCHEUERMAN
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Abstract

Political cosmopolitanism comes in many different shapes and sizes. Despite its intellectual diversity, cosmopolitanism typically agrees on one crucial matter: any prospective global democracy is best envisioned not in terms of a hierarchical world state, but instead as a multilayered system of global governance resting on an unprecedented dispersion of decision-making authority. In discarding traditional ideas of world government, cosmopolitans typically succumb to a series of mistakes. First, they presuppose unfairly dismissive accounts of world government. Second, they misleadingly contrast their own multilayered and (allegedly) institutionally novel vision to early modern (for example, Hobbesian) ideas of sovereignty, or to Max Weber's influential definition of the modern state. They thus obscure the fact that the modern state's diverse manifestations can only be partly grasped by ideal-types drawn from either Hobbes or Weber. Consequently, they depend on straw person accounts of the modern state. Third, envisioning their proposals as building on the familiar ideal of institutional checks and balances, they misconstrue the contribution that checks and balances can make to global-level democracy. Their hostility to statist ideas about global democracy notwithstanding, their proposals sometimes mimic core attributes of traditional statehood, and they tend inadvertently to ‘bring the state back in’ to global democracy.

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Articles
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Review of International Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 419 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2013 

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References

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27 Held, Democracy and the Global Order, p. 229. Brown is also critical of ‘immediately designing a world state from a hypothetical vacuum’ in part because a world state denies that nation-states are likely to remain necessary components of the global order, even when reconstructed along ambitious cosmopolitan lines (Brown, Grounding Cosmopolitanism, p. 203).

28 See Shaw, Martin, Theory of the Global State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and also the essays collected in Albert, Mathias and Stichweh, Rudolf (eds), Weltstaat und Weltstaatlichkeit. Beobachtung globaler politischer Strukturbildung (Wiesbasde: Verlag für Sozialwissenschafen, 2007)Google Scholar.

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32 Archibugi, Global Commonwealth of Citizens, pp. 97–9.

33 Kuper, Democracy Beyond Borders, p. 132. This argument is found among others as well.

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39 Falk, Richard, Humane Governance: Towards a New Global Politics (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995), p. 99Google Scholar. On this matter, see also, Cohen, Jean L., ‘Whose Sovereignty? Empire Versus International Law’, Ethics & International Affairs, 18:3 (2004), pp. 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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45 Ibid.

46 Kuper, Democracy Beyond Borders, pp. 29–31. Also, Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, p. 163; Held, ‘Law of States, Law of Peoples: Three Models of Sovereignty’, pp. 27–8. Bohman also describes his model as representing a ‘distinctly transnational [but still poststatist] form of federalism’, (Democracy Across Borders, pp. 127, 145).

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49 Whatever the limits of its own anti-statism, this was a key insight of mid-century English political pluralism. See Bartelson, Jens, The Critique of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 77–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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57 Nettl, ‘The State as Conceptual Variable’, p. 586. Admittedly, more conceptual (and empirical) work needs to be done in order to flesh out the idea of ‘stateness’. But I do see it as a potentially fruitful alternative to the flawed thinking about the state found in much international political theory. Of course, cosmopolitans are not alone in succumbing to crude ideas about the state. Yet precisely because so much of their institutional argument hangs on the idea of a global order allegedly lacking in traditional state attributions (for example, a monopoly on legitimate coercion), their views suffer from this flaw in ways some competing theoretical perspectives perhaps do not.

58 See Eriksen, Unfinished Democratization of Europe, pp. 160–1; Terry MacDonald, Global Stakeholder Democracy, pp. 51–61; or Linklater, Andrew's definition of the state in terms of ‘monopoly powers’ in The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 197Google Scholar.

59 This would, in any event, be a surprising claim given the awesome power instruments which the US has efficaciously – though not always wisely – employed over the course of the last century.

60 An important exception here is Matthias Koenig-Archibugi, who sees global democracy as requiring sufficient ‘stateness’, which he associates with a relatively high degree of political-institutional centralization, but not a full monopoly on coercion. See Koenig-Archibugi, ‘Is Global Democracy Possible?’, pp. 526–7, 531. Yet even he remains tied to the conventional definition of the modern state in terms of its monopoly of coercion, which then leads him to envision desirable global democracy as requiring a ‘polity’ but not a ‘state’. This may be a difference without substance: most if not all modern states have been ‘polities’ in Koenig-Archibugi's sense.

61 Bohman, Democracy Across Borders, p. 67.

62 A matter downplayed by the somewhat romanticised account of the antebellum (and supposedly non-statist) US polity in Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security From the Polis to Global Village.

63 Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, p. 150.

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69 See, for example, Bohman, Democracy Across Borders, esp. pp. 125–30, who accuses even Held and Habermas of advocating ‘top-down’, hierarchical, and implicitly statist models of global decision-making. Echoes of the same view can be found elsewhere (for example, Kuper, Democracy Beyond Borders, pp. 31–2.)

70 Bohman, Democracy Across Borders, pp. 33–4.

71 Shapcott, ‘Anti-Cosmopolitanism, Pluralism, and the Cosmopolitan Harm Principle’, p. 199.

72 Brown, Grounding Cosmopolitanism, p. 194.

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83 Goodhart, Democracy as Human Rights, pp. 189–90.

84 Eriksen, The Unfinished Democratization of Europe, pp. 179–80, 185–215.

85 Archibugi, Global Commonwealth of Citizens, p. 129.

86 Ibid.

87 Cohen and Sabel, ‘Sovereignty and Solidarity: EU and US’, pp. 366–7.

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89 Cohen and Sabel, ‘Extra Rempublicam Nulla Justitia’, p. 165. The anti-statist tone is more pronounced in ‘Global Democracy?’, where the authors suggest that their model need not operate ‘in the shadow of the state’.

90 Kuper, Democracy Beyond Borders, p. 155.

91 MacDonald, Global Stakeholder Democracy, pp. 15, 160–2.

92 Ibid., p. 210; for her view of the state, see pp. 51–61.

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94 Evans, Peter, Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda (ed.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Unfortunately, the resulting revival of thinking about the state in US political science was marred by its own excessive deference to Weberian views.

95 Bartelson, Critique of the State, pp. 88–113

96 I am thinking of Harold Laski. For the details, see Deane, Herbert A., The Political Ideals of Harold J. Laski (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955)Google Scholar.