Institutional Cosmopolitanism 0190905654, 9780190905651

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Institutional Cosmopolitanism

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Institutional Cosmopolitanism Edited by Luis Cabrera

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​090565–​1 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

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To Jamie Mayerfeld Inspiring teacher, mentor, scholar

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CONTENTS

Contributors  ix 1. Introduction: Institutions as a Cosmopolitan Concern   1 Luis Cabrera I. Cosmopolitanism and the Sovereign State 2. Popular Resource Sovereignty   23 Leif Wenar 3. Reflections on Institutional Cosmopolitanism: State Responsibility in a Globalized Age   59 Richard Beardsworth 4. The Responsible Cosmopolitan State   79 Richard Shapcott II. Global Governance Institutions: Cosmopolitan Assessments and Reforms 5. Global Governance: Procedures, Outcomes, and Justice   107 Simon Caney 6. Reform, Resist, Create: Institutional Cosmopolitanism and Duties Toward Suprastate Institutions   130 Luis Cabrera 7. International Organizations and Democracy: An Assessment   154 Mathias Koenig-​Archibugi III. Cosmopolitan Institutions, from City to World State 8. Global Justice at the Municipal Scale: The Case of Medellín, Colombia  189 Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz 9. Demos-​cracy for the European Union: Why and How   216 Philippe Van Parijs

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10. Cosmopolitan Justice, Democracy, and the World State   232 Catherine Lu 11. All Together Now: Geography, the Three Cosmopolitanisms, and Planetary Earth   253 Daniel H. Deudney Index  277

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CONTRIBUTORS

Richard Beardsworth, Professor of International Politics, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University; University Director of Ethics, Aberystwyth University Luis Cabrera, Associate Professor of Political Science, School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University Simon Caney, Professor of Political Theory, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick Teddy Cruz, Professor of Public Culture and Urbanism, University of California, San Diego (UCSD); Founding Codirector, UCSD Cross-​ Border Initiative Daniel H. Deudney, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University Fonna Forman, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, San Diego (UCSD); Founding Director, UCSD Center on Global Justice; Founding Codirector, UCSD Cross-​Border Initiative Mathias Koenig-​Archibugi, Associate Professor of Global Politics, Department of Government and Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science Catherine Lu, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, McGill University Richard Shapcott, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of Queensland Philippe Van Parijs, Professor, Faculty of Economic, Social, and Political Sciences, Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics, University of Louvain Leif Wenar, Chair of Philosophy and Law, School of Law, King’s College London

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Institutional Cosmopolitanism

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Institutions as a Cosmopolitan Concern LUIS C ABRER A  

1.1 THE CENTRALITY OF INSTITUTIONS TO COSMOPOLITAN THOUGHT

Is a global institutional order composed of sovereign states fit for cosmopolitan moral purpose? This question has lain near the heart of cosmopolitan thought at least since Immanuel Kant’s interventions of the 1780s and 1790s. Kant seemed torn between supporting large-​scale global institutional reforms—​the creation of a world republic—​and promoting a more modest transformation of states and their interrelations within a voluntary union.1

   I  would like to thank Catherine Lu, Richard Beardsworth, Mathias Koenig-​ Archibugi, and Simon Caney for their helpful input on this chapter, and Thomas Pogge for his detailed written feedback on the presentation of cosmopolitan approaches. With regard to the volume overall, I thank Jamie Mayerfeld and Richard Shapcott for their ongoing insight and advice, the anonymous reviewer for Oxford University Press for penetrating and helpful comments on each of the chapters, and Peter Ohlin at the Press for his patient guidance throughout the process. The title of the chapter pays homage to Charles Beitz, “Human Rights as a Common Concern,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 2 (2001): 269–​82. 1.  See Immanuel Kant, Kant: Political Writings, 2nd ed., H. S. Reiss, ed., and H. B. Nisbet, trans. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press). The essays most salient here are Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,” 41–​53; “On the Common Saying, ‘This May Be True in Theory But It Does Not Apply in Practice,’ ” 61–​92; and “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” 93–​130. On the tension between institutional models in Kant’s writings, see Thomas Pogge, “Kant’s

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He ultimately advocated the confederal system of “Perpetual Peace,” in part from a presumption that states would not be willing to place themselves within a stronger framework, however desirable it might seem for promoting moral cosmopolitan ends. Likewise, in the more recent flowering of cosmopolitan thought, dating to the 1970s and intensifying from the immediate post–​Cold War period, a persistent question has been whether states can be ascribed duties consistent with a cosmopolitan moral orientation, or whether, as Harold Laski memorably put it in 1925, state sovereignty is simply “incompatible with the interests of humanity.”2

1.1.1 Def ining Cosmopolitanism

Such institutional questions are central to this volume. More specifically, contributors are concerned with how and why institutional rules, practices, and bodies at all levels—​from municipal to state, suprastate regional and fully global—​can and should be informed by cosmopolitan principles, constrained by them, or ultimately transformed so as to be made consistent with them. At the core of such principles is an understanding that ethnic or religious communities, states, or other groupings do not have ultimate moral significance; individuals do. For the cosmopolitan, human beings are the ultimate agents of moral concern, though the object of moral concern, or what should be promoted or realized for them, may be expressed in a variety of ways, for example, as human rights, human needs, preference satisfaction, etc.3 Vision of a Just World Order,” in Thomas Hill, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Kant’s Ethics (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2009), 196–​208; Nancy Kokaz, “Institutions for Global Justice,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (2005):  65–​107. See also Garrett Wallace Brown, Grounding Cosmopolitanism:  From Kant to the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Constitution (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2009), at 106–​10; Charles Beitz, “Rawls’s Law of Peoples,” Ethics 110, no. 4 (2000): 669–​96, at 673, fn. 10; and see Deudney, this volume. 2. Harold Laski, A Grammar of Politics, 4th ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937), 64. The quotation appeared in the first edition, published in 1925. Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown raise a question in the same vein in the context of recent debates between cosmopolitan and noncosmopolitan theorists of global justice about the role of states: “[A]‌re they indispensable instruments in the pursuit of justice . . . or are they rather inimical to it, because they entrench state interests at the expense of individuals in need?” Kleingeld and Brown, “Cosmopolitanism,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 ed.), available at http://​plato. stanford.edu/​archives/​fall2014/​entries/​cosmopolitanism/​. 3. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), 175–​76; Gillian Brock, for example, adopts Pogge’s three-​part definition of cosmopolitanism while expressing the object of moral concern as generalizable human needs, rather than the human rights that Pogge emphasizes. Gillian Brock, Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 12, ch. 3. [ 2 ]  Luis Cabrera

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Cosmopolitanism also is a fundamentally universal moral approach, meaning it sees this concern as attaching equally to every person, not solely or primarily to members of some subgroup. Finally, cosmopolitanism is characterized by generality: all persons are of ultimate concern for all others, not solely for members of their own group.4 Such an approach can be contrasted with, for example, an “international moral skepticism,” which sees little place for the promotion of moral principles beyond the state; or a less rigid “morality of states,” which ascribes some moral standing specifically to states, independent of the moral standing of the individuals within them.5 Cosmopolitanism can also be contrasted with associative approaches (statist, nationalist, etc.), which see claims of global justice as strongly limited, or even negated, by existing relations between persons, for example, by shared nationality6 or by reciprocity and other ties between domestic cocitizens.7 I will note that the distinctiveness of a cosmopolitan approach has been challenged on the grounds that it simply offers broad universalistic principles to which a range of such nation-​and state-​centric theorists can claim to also be committed.8 Thomas Pogge’s response, detailing an institutional impartiality distinct to cosmopolitanism, is instructive. He argues that just as domestic political institutions must be impartial with regard to promoting the interests of specific societal groups, so cosmopolitanism holds that global decision-​making mechanisms must be arranged so they are genuinely impartial toward the needs and interests of all persons, regardless of their state

4. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 175ff; see also Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3–​4. 5. This point is discussed by Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1999), 181–​91; see also Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, 10–​13, 265ff. 6. David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 7. Michael Blake, “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 30, no. 3 (2001): 257–​96; Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 33, no. 2 (2005):  113–​47, at 146; see Mathias Risse, On Global Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Many cosmopolitans themselves focus on relations between persons globally to argue that the circumstances of justice extend beyond the state. For example, Beitz and Pogge each cite the fact of shared global institutions, or deep economic or harm interdependence between states, as justification for extending principles of distributive justice globally. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, 200–​4; Pogge, “Concluding Reflections,” in Gillian Brock, ed., Cosmopolitanism Versus Non-​Cosmopolitanism:  Critiques, Defenses, Reconceptualizations (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 294–​319, at 313–​14; see also Darrel Moellendorf, Global Inequality Matters (Basingstoke, UK:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 8.  Michael Blake, “We Are All Cosmopolitans Now,” in Gillian Brock, ed., Cosmopolitanism Versus Non-​Cosmopolitanism: Critiques, Defenses, Reconceptualizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 35–​54.

Introduction 

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or other subgroup memberships.9 In other words, a cosmopolitan morality would demand that global agreements on, for example, climate change mitigation or trade liberalization, be produced by means that impartially take into account the equally weighted interests of all persons. Thus, we can see that within cosmopolitanism, what is ostensibly a general commitment to human moral equality, widely accepted even by state-​centric theorists, leads to a distinctive and stringent, but still scope-​limited, impartiality requirement.10 It does not demand a first-​order impartiality, where even close family members can be given no special consideration in any circumstances,11 but it does demand impartial treatment by political institutions beyond the state similar to that applying within.

1.1.2 Moral and Institutional Cosmopolitanism

Some further distinctions can be identified within cosmopolitan thought that are significant in the context of this volume. The first is between moral and institutional cosmopolitanism. Moral cosmopolitanism embodies the three characteristics of cosmopolitanism sketched previously—​normative individualism, universality, and generality—​and it focuses on ways in which they should condition and constrain the conduct of individuals and groups, as well as figure in the assessment of existing institutional rules and practices. It does not recommend extensive integration between states or other fundamental changes to the global order. By contrast, institutional cosmopolitanism has a global integration imperative at its heart. It is committed to creating a fully global political system. Such wholesale transformation is prescribed to overcome barriers to cosmopolitan aims which tend to arise within a system of sovereign states.12 I say more on institutional cosmopolitanism later in this 9. Pogge, “Concluding Reflections,” 304. 10. For related discussions of cosmopolitan impartiality, see Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, 199–​200; Brian Barry, “International Society from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” in David Mapel and Terry Nardin, eds., International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 144–​63, at 145; Amartya Sen, “Open and Closed Partiality,” in Andrew Kuper, ed., Global Responsibilities:  Who Must Deliver on Human Rights? (New  York:  Routledge, 2005), 53–​76. 11.  For a helpful elaboration of this claim, see Daniel Weinstock, “Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Unpacking the Arguments,” in Will Kymlicka and Kathryn Walker, eds., Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Canada and the World (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012), 87–​104. 12.  On distinctions between moral and institutional cosmopolitanism, see Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, 199; Barry, “International Society,” 144; Jeremy Waldron, “What Is Cosmopolitan?” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 227–​43, at 228–​29. For those expressly advocating full global institutional and political integration to realize cosmopolitan aims, see Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, ch. 7 (Pogge uses the term “legal cosmopolitanism” instead of “institutional [ 4 ]  Luis Cabrera

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chapter. Here, I  will note that the “institutional cosmopolitanism” of the volume title is meant to encompass the full range of cosmopolitan institutional concerns, from moral cosmopolitan arguments focused on assessing global institutional practices, and on reforming states and other collective institutional agents, to “integrative” institutional cosmopolitan arguments advocating full global political integration.

1.1.3 Variants of Moral Cosmopolitanism

Moral cosmopolitanism can be seen as having two key variants. One is “interactional cosmopolitanism.”13 It is focused again on the conduct of individuals and collective agents, seeing them as directly responsible for realizing cosmopolitan aims or securing the objects of moral concern—​rights, needs, etc. Where individual actions are concerned, for example, Peter Singer, in a well-​known series of arguments, calls on relatively affluent persons globally to donate a significantly greater portion of their own resources to address severe poverty worldwide.14 Collective interactional cosmopolitan arguments would include those exhorting states to act as “good international citizens” by making respect for human rights central to their foreign policy, assuming robust foreign aid obligations, and taking right action on international environmental issues.15 The second variant of moral cosmopolitanism focuses on assessing the justice of existing schemes of global institutions, or the rules and practices that regulate interactions among persons globally. Here, the responsibility for realizing cosmopolitan aims lies with institutional schemes, and individual cosmopolitanism”); Luis Cabrera, Political Theory of Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State (London:  Routledge, 2004); Luis Cabrera, The Practice of Global Citizenship (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), chs. 2–​3; David Copp, “International Justice and the Basic Needs Principle,” in Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, eds., The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005), 39–​54; Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, 159ff; Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice and Institutional Design:  An Egalitarian Liberal Conception of Global Governance.” Social Theory and Practice 32, no. 4 (2006):  725–​56; Lea Ypi, “Cosmopolitanism Without If and Without But,” in Gillian Brock, ed., Cosmopolitanism Versus Non-​Cosmopolitanism: Critiques, Defenses, Reconceptualizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 75–​91. Copp, it should be noted, is skeptical that such integration will be possible. On that question, see also Charles Jones, Global Justice: Defending Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 228–​30. 13. See Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 176–​77. 14. Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972): 229–​43; Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (London: Picador, 2009); see also Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 15.  Nicholas J. Wheeler and Timothy Dunne, “Good International Citizenship:  A Third Way for British Foreign Policy,” International Affairs 74, no. 4 (1998): 847–​70.

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duties are oriented toward ensuring the justice of such schemes or of discrete institutional agents such as states, the World Trade Organization (WTO), etc. These could include negative duties to avoid contributing to the design or imposition of an unjust institutional order globally,16 or more general positive duties to contribute to the reform and development of global institutions and governance agents to promote more just outcomes. While all of the contributors to this volume are concerned to some extent with assessing the justice of the current global institutional order, some also develop and defend interactional cosmopolitan claims focused on collective institutional agents, especially states. The chapters by Richard Beardsworth and Richard Shapcott, for example, both explore how states, rather than impeding advancement of the “interests of humanity,” could serve them. Leif Wenar focuses on domestic institutional practice, but in the context of global rules and norms that enable authoritarian leaders to use national resources such as oil for their own benefit rather than that of their people. Promoting a principle of domestic popular sovereignty over resources for all states, he argues, could contribute greatly to more just global outcomes.

1.1.4 Variants of Institutional Cosmopolitanism

Institutional cosmopolitanism will be understood here as “integrative” institutional cosmopolitanism, although the more standard term also will be used, including in some contributors’ chapters. Institutional cosmopolitanism is concerned with reasons to pursue binding and relatively comprehensive global political integration, where global institutional agents would exercise supremacy over states in some significant range of issue areas. Such an integrated global system is not typically conceived on the Hobbesian or Kantian model of a state, meaning an entity possessing some absolute and indivisible sovereignty concentrated at the highest level. Rather, cosmopolitan global political integration is seen by its advocates as compatible with a global division of governing powers, a vertical dispersal of sovereignty between states, substate units and global bodies, etc.17 Within institutional cosmopolitanism are two approaches that are significant in this volume. The first, “fundamentally instrumental” approach is concerned with ways in which global integration likely will be needed to 16. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 176–​83. 17. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 184–​87; Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, 163–​64. For a critique of such claims and an argument that there would have to be a significant concentration of coercive power at the top within an institutional cosmopolitan scheme, or a world government or state more generally, see William Scheuerman, “Cosmopolitanism and the World State,” Review of International Studies 40, no. 3 (2014): 419–​41. [ 6 ]  Luis Cabrera

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realize aims or moral outputs consistent with cosmopolitanism: again, human rights protections or the fulfillment of human needs or capabilities. It sees both integration and democratic participation beyond the state as primarily instrumental to generating such outputs. The second, “democratic procedural” approach, often called cosmopolitan democracy,18 focuses more narrowly on ensuring adequate inputs. It seeks to ensure that all persons will have appropriate input on decisions which may deeply affect them, and thus it would prescribe the creation of global democratic institutions.19 Fundamentally instrumental accounts tend to focus on those barriers to achieving cosmopolitan aims which naturally arise in the current global system. These include persistent collective-​ action and related assurance problems which prevent solutions to such urgent challenges as climate change and nuclear weapons control. They also include biases in favor of the domestic community which impede state compliance with cosmopolitan distributive aims, among other issues. A more integrated global system, embedding states within regional and global institutions that have robust compliance powers and are guided by cosmopolitan impartiality and related principles, is seen as the appropriate institutional means of overcoming the barriers and achieving cosmopolitan moral aims.20 Such accounts typically will support the democratization of institutions beyond the state or the creation of new democratic institutions. This will be, however, primarily to help ensure that regional and global governance outputs are consistent with cosmopolitan moral aims. Participatory input is seen as a means of promoting appropriate substantive outputs and of better enabling individuals to protect their own rights, meet their needs, etc.21 Also, policy 18. Daniele Archibugi and David Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995); Daniele Archibugi and David Held, “Cosmopolitan Democracy: Paths and Agents,” Ethics & International Affairs 25, no. 4 (2011): 433–​61. 19.  On distinctions between instrumental and procedural approaches, see Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, 152–​64; and the chapters by Caney and Cabrera, this volume. Some authors, notably Pogge and Caney, draw on both instrumental and procedural reasons to support full global integration. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 187–​95; Simon Caney, “The Responsibilities and Legitimacy of Economic International Institutions,” in Lukas Meyer, ed., Justice, Legitimacy, and Public International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 92–​122, at 116–​18; see also Caney, this volume. 20.  See Cabrera, The Practice of Global Citizenship, chs. 2–​3; Copp, “International Justice and the Basic Needs Principle”; Ypi, “Cosmopolitanism Without If and Without But”; see also Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), at 228ff; Charles Jones, Global Justice: Defending Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 206–​10; 228–​30. 21.  Daniel Weinstock, “The Real World of (Global) Democracy,” Journal of Social Philosophy 37, no. 1 (2006): 6–​20; and see Lu and Cabrera, this volume; see also Van Parijs, this volume, for an instrumental account of democracy focused on the European Union context; on instrumental justifications for democratic rule more generally, see

Introduction 

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decisions would be broadly constrained by the substantive cosmopolitan aims, e.g., most accounts would reject means of providing broader human rights protections which themselves involved large-​scale rights violations.22 In the near term, a fundamentally instrumental account focused on promoting human rights protections, for example, likely would give primary emphasis to strengthening existing international human rights regimes, rather than creating suprastate democratic bodies, as the more promising route to achieving cosmopolitan rights aims.23 Finally, it can be noted that some instrumentally oriented cosmopolitan theorists do not advocate comprehensive global institutional integration. They support some global institutional changes in the name of promoting more just outcomes, but they reject comprehensive integration because of presumed uncertainty or dissensus on moral principles.24 Others cite related concerns about preserving a diverse society of states, as well as concerns about avoiding potentially bad consequences, particularly the familiar specter of tyranny under world government.25 Thus, they opt for global institutions capable of promoting some important cosmopolitan outputs, but which would be much more limited in their capacities to set and obtain compliance with rules or legislation. Democratic procedural accounts again typically focus not on achieving specific cosmopolitan outputs, but on adequate input. Theorists here begin from a presumption that all individuals have a bedrock entitlement to democratic participation. It is said to be inherently required to show adequate respect for individual autonomy or equality. That is, to deny democratic participation in decision-​making processes which have significant effects on individuals, or which could possibly affect them or subject them to political coercion, is to deny their status as equal, autonomous persons.26 Democracy Thomas Christiano, “An Instrumental Argument for a Human Right to Democracy,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 39, no. 2 (2011):  142–​76; Amartya Sen, Democracy as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 6; William Talbott, Which Rights Should Be Universal? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 7. 22.  However, see Simon Caney, “Responding to Global Injustice:  On the Right of Resistance,” Social Philosophy and Policy 32, no. 1 (2015): 51–​73. Caney offers a careful treatment of some issues around permissible means in promoting global justice, including some circumstances in which harms may be permissible. 23. On human rights regimes, see Andreas Follesdal, Johan Karlsson Schaffer, and Geir Ulfstein, eds., The Legitimacy of International Human Rights Regimes: Legal, Political, and Philosophical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 24. Allen Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-​Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 219–​30; Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), ch. 11. 25. Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard, 2006), at 313. 26.  For exemplar “all affected” accounts, see David Held, Global Covenant, ch. 6; Daniele Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens:  Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2008), 57–​ 59; Mathias [ 8 ]  Luis Cabrera

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is thus not seen as instrumental to realizing a more substantive and expansive set of moral goods; it simply is required to show adequate respect for the individual. Such an approach entails full global political integration, it is argued, because essentially all persons are—​or could be—​affected in the salient ways by global decision processes in the current system.27 And many theorists here would want to limit rights guarantees to ones directly related to democratic participation, consistent with a democratic procedural approach more generally.28 Several chapters in this volume, particularly those by Simon Caney, Philippe Van Parijs, Catherine Lu, and Luis Cabrera, work from the fundamentally instrumental side of institutional cosmopolitanism. Caney, Lu, and Mathias Koenig-​Archibugi also emphasize the democratic procedural aspects of governance beyond the state. Meanwhile, Daniel Deudney offers an argument with strong implications for global political integration, but on grounds that it should be supported from all individuals’ “enlightened self-​interest” under conditions of intense global interdependence, rather than from an other-​regarding cosmopolitan moral imperative.

Koenig-​Archibugi, “Is Global Democracy Possible?” European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 3 (2011): 519–​42; and see Koenig-​Archibugi, this volume. For an “all possibly affected” account, see Robert Goodin, “Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 35, no. 1 (2007): 40–​68. For “all possibly subjected” to political coercion, see Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders,” Political Theory 36, no. 1 (2008): 37–​65. 27. Held in particular argues for a fully global set of binding democratic institutions with significant governance powers, though he does not claim a world government descriptor:  David Held, Democracy and the Global Order:  From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995), 279. Others argue for less powerful global democratic bodies which still could enhance global democratic input and accountability. See Daniele Archibugi, Global Commonwealth. For an account of global democracy that explicitly calls for the creation of a more comprehensive world state, see Raffaele Marchetti, Global Democracy, For and Against: Ethical Theory, Institutional Design, and Social Struggles (London: Routledge, 2008). 28.  See Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement: Why Moral Conflict Cannot Be Avoided in Politics, and What Should Be Done About It (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard, 1996), 33–​34. The authors distinguish between proceduralist theories of democracy and constitutionalist ones in the domestic frame. Proceduralist theories would limit rights guarantees to those necessary for democratic participation, while constitutionalist theories seek to bound democratic outcomes with limits set by more comprehensive sets of rights. David Held argues at length for adopting the narrower proceduralist approach globally:  see Democracy and the Global Order, 190–​201. For a critique of a focus on rights solely as enablers of democratic participation, see Luis Cabrera, “Diversity and Cosmopolitan Democracy: Avoiding Global Democratic Relativism,” Global Constitutionalism 4, no. 1 (2015): 18–​48.

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1.1.5 Cosmopolitan Citizenship

Finally, we can note the long history of linkages between cosmopolitan thought and conceptions of global citizenship applying to individuals. It is, after all, Diogenes the Cynic who, in declaring himself a “citizen of the world,” is often said to be the originator of the cosmopolitan tradition.29 The linkage can be traced through Marcus Aurelius’s conception of all persons joined by right reason in a single global community,30 to Kant’s exhortation for all persons to envision themselves as situated within a “kingdom of ends” in order to more clearly discern their moral duties,31 to more recent treatments of “cosmopolitan citizenship.”32 While many in this tradition have framed global citizenship in interactional terms, as an ethic to be adopted by individual agents, others have identified an integration imperative. This imperative sees individual duties of global or cosmopolitan citizenship as ones to promote movement toward a concrete global citizen community, joining individuals as citizens across states and suprastate regions.33 In this volume, the chapters by Wenar, Van Parijs, and Cabrera emphasize some roles that are played or could be played by individual citizens in a cosmopolitan frame, or, in Van Parijs’s case, a European regional frame; and in Wenar’s case, a state-​centric frame that could be shown to promote some outcomes consistent with moral cosmopolitan principles. In sum, each of the contributions to this volume treats institutions as central to the cosmopolitan project or, more broadly, to achieving outcomes consistent with cosmopolitan moral principles. Again, not all seek the kind of wholesale transformation associated here with integrative institutional cosmopolitanism. All, however, are concerned to identify ways in which 29. See Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in Joshua Cohen, ed., For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002): 2–​ 17, at 6–​8. 30. Derek Heater, World Citizenship and Government: Cosmopolitan Ideas in the History of Western Political Thought (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996), 19–​21. 31.  Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Mary Gregor, trans. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1785]), at 41–​ 46. See Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), at 205–​6. He argues that Kant’s imagined kingdom of ends should be transformed where possible into actual transstate citizen sets. See also Pauline Kleingeld, “Kant’s Cosmopolitan Law: World Citizenship for a Global Order,” Kantian Review 2(1998): 72–​90. She focuses on the implications of Kant’s right of hospitality for nonnationals in their dealings with states. 32. Kimberly Hutchings, “Political Theory and Cosmopolitan Citizenship,” in Kimberly Hutchings and Roland Dannreuther, eds., Cosmopolitan Citizenship (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999), 3–​32. 33.  Christien Van Den Anker, “Global Justice, Global Institutions, and Global Citizenship,” in Nigel Dower and John Williams, eds., Global Citizenship:  A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 158–​68; see Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community; Cabrera, The Practice of Global Citizenship, chs. 1–​2. [ 10 ]  Luis Cabrera

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cosmopolitan aims could be promoted in the global system, and all put institutional concerns at the heart of their analyses. The next sections offer brief summaries of each chapter.

1.2 SECTION I: COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE SOVEREIGN STATE

In this section, chapters by Wenar, Beardsworth, and Shapcott offer arguments for promoting outcomes more consistent with moral cosmopolitanism, while still working with the institutional materials at hand, namely, the sovereign states system. Thus, while they may see some standard practices within that system as in tension with cosmopolitan aims, they do not view wholesale institutional transformation as the appropriate remedy, at least not in the foreseeable future. For Wenar, any hope of even a distant integrated cosmopolitan future will require addressing a vexing present-​day conundrum: the resource curse.34 The very developing countries which would seem blessed by an abundance of natural resources, particularly oil, too often find that same resource wealth a barrier to cultivating stable, domestic, democratic institutions. The appropriate solution, he argues, is reinforcing the principle of national or domestic popular sovereignty, especially as concerns popular resource sovereignty. Such a principle is found, he notes, in Article 1 of both major binding United Nations (UN) human rights covenants,35 specifying that the people of a country have the right to dispose of its material resources. It also appears in numerous domestic constitutions and laws. Wenar is skeptical of arguments for problematizing and extending democratic boundaries. He sees such proposals as greatly premature at best. In the current system, he argues, the presumption that peoples are contained within existing state boundaries and have the right to control their own states’ natural resources can go some way toward delegitimizing authoritarian leaders’ claims to control those resources. Reinforcing the democratic sovereign state, rather than seeking to subsume it in the near term within some larger entity, is the appropriate solution to the resource curse. Beardsworth also gives significant weight to feasibility concerns in his engagement with Pogge’s arguments for global integration to transform national self-​interest into a cosmopolitan collective interest. Such a change

34. See also Leif Wenar, Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules That Run the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 35.  International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 999 UNTS 171 (1966); International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), 993 UNTS 3 (1966).

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would be laudable, Beardsworth argues, but achieving it is not feasible in the near term. Thus, he argues for harnessing national interest in service of the global interest, especially when concerns can be framed as collective-​action problems. In the case of threats such as climate change and nuclear weapons, he contends, we must view the state as the relevant political agent, and we must find ways to motivate action by states to solve shared problems. After considering some recent ways in which state responsibilities to act have been framed, including in the discourse on good international citizenship and the responsibility to protect doctrine,36 Beardsworth identifies two primary types of state responsibilities or sets of duties:  those to outsiders and those to the state’s own population. The discharge of duties to outsiders may be difficult to motivate, he notes. So, his primary focus is on ways to motivate and especially reorient states’ duties to protect their own populations in ways that compel them also to take into account the needs of outsiders. Drawing on republican international theory, he argues that a limited cession or pooling of sovereignty by states to address large-​scale threats globally would be consistent with an ethic of responsibility to insiders, while also fulfilling significant duties toward outsiders, consistent with cosmopolitan moral aims. Shapcott also draws on republican theory, but his focus is on domestic constitutional changes that could promote state action more consistent with cosmopolitan principles. He argues that the development of the republican constitutional state marks one of the most important historical institutional innovations, given its emphasis on checking domestic domination by governments. An important next step will be extending such principles of nondomination to those outside the state. Such changes, he argues, would represent a crucial extension of the social contract to outsiders. Shapcott eschews a call for global system transformation. Instead, he argues for incorporating a cosmopolitan harm principle, or the observance by states of minimal negative duties to avoid harming the core interests of those in other states, into domestic constitutions. This would better ensure that state behavior toward outsiders is appropriately constrained. He asserts that such an approach is superior to the kind of grand transformation envisioned by integrative institutional cosmopolitans, in large part because their institutional ideals generally do not come with a clear path to realization. Thus, it is more practical to use the existing institutions of 36. Wheeler and Dunne, “Good International Citizenship”; see also Alex J. Bellamy, Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge, UK:  Polity Press, 2008). The responsibility to protect doctrine holds that states forfeit sovereign prerogatives against interference, or ultimately, intervention if they fail to protect their citizens from genocide, ethnic cleansing, or related crimes against humanity. See United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, “Responsibility to Protect,” http://​www. un.org/​en/​genocideprevention/​. Accessed August 5, 2017. [ 12 ]  Luis Cabrera

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the state to promote treatment of outsiders that is more consistent with cosmopolitan aims.

1.3 SECTION II: GLOBAL GOVERNANCE INSTITUTIONS: COSMOPOLITAN ASSESSMENTS AND REFORMS

In contrast to the first three authors, those in Section II—​Caney, Cabrera, and Koenig-​ Archibugi—​ all presume that achieving cosmopolitan moral aims will require the creation of a global framework of strong cosmopolitan institutions, or the transformation of existing suprastate institutions in a cosmopolitan direction. Each is concerned to some extent with issues of normative legitimacy, or what can morally justify the power increasingly exercised over individuals by governance bodies beyond the state, and with how political authority should be distributed in a cosmopolitan frame. Caney’s aim is to demonstrate the compatibility of the two main approaches to institutional cosmopolitanism noted previously:  instrumental and democratic procedural. A  fundamentally instrumental approach, he notes, can highlight the importance of institutional change beyond the state for addressing such problems as climate change, global poverty, fair trade, and securing peace. He asserts, however, that cosmopolitanism is incomplete if it does not also address concerns around creating democratically inclusive suprastate governance bodies. Caney argues for adopting an “all-​affected” procedural approach alongside an instrumental one. The two approaches are not necessarily in tension, he argues, and in fact, they can reinforce each other in important ways in service of promoting global outcomes aligned with cosmopolitan moral aims. To demonstrate this, he first emphasizes the flexibility of the procedural ideal. An “all affected” democratic procedural principle, he argues, could be operable in various global institutional configurations, consistent with achieving more cosmopolitan global outcomes. It also would be compatible with various types of democratic representation and with the use of expert advisory bodies on specific global issues. Caney further explores flexibility in types of global duties, or the various ways in which all persons’ core entitlements could be realized. Such entitlements often can be abstract, he notes. For example, in the context of climate change mitigation, all persons may be entitled to the realization of vital interests such as access to food, health care, and education, but that does not settle questions around what type of energy generation should be adopted to realize those entitlements. Such questions—​about whether energy should come primarily from solar power, wind, etc.—​can and should be decided by those affected. Democratic decision processes also can help to Introduction 

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clarify related questions around the distribution of duties in combating climate change and realizing entitlements. Cabrera adopts a more thoroughgoing instrumentalism in exploring possible individual duties toward global governance bodies. These duties, he argues, will be broadly similar to ones of political obligation in the domestic frame. They will be unlikely, however, to take the form of any general duty to obey, or to simply support existing processes of global governance, given the decidedly uncosmopolitan character of the current system. He identifies four types of duties toward global governance institutions. Each is determined in large part by how well an organization ultimately would “fit” into a global system that plausibly would realize cosmopolitan moral aims, rendered here as robust individual rights protections for all persons. Because of the biases and other barriers to achieving such aims noted previously, a fully integrated, democratic global political system is identified as the appropriate long-​term institutional aim. From such an envisioned end point, the following types of duties are specified: ones of critical compliance with governance exercised by some existing institutional bodies, more typical duties of reform to address specific flaws in institutional designs, and duties of rejection toward bodies which are more fundamentally flawed and would not fit within an integrated cosmopolitan global system. Also identified are duties to support the creation of new institutions as needed to achieve cosmopolitan aims. Creation duties are seen as likely to be much more common than in the domestic sphere, given the relative underdevelopment of the global institutional system, and they are likely to be more pressing in many cases than duties toward existing institutions. Finally, individual democratic participation is seen as a crucial part of such a scheme, but again primarily for instrumental reasons:  for the roles it can play in helping to promote and sustain rights protections, rather than because democracy necessarily respects individual autonomy or equality. For persistent minorities, Cabrera observes, both autonomy and equality can be more restricted than realized under majoritarian decision procedures. Koenig-​ Archibugi explores the lessons that might be drawn for cosmopolitans from existing global institutions. He draws on an extensive range of empirical scholarship to assess intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) in terms of their impact on democratic governance within and between states. He gives particular scrutiny to those with relatively strong compliance mechanisms, including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), WTO, and institutions of the European Union (EU). He notes that the legitimacy or defensibility of such institutions can be assessed in two main ways. One way, which he sees as exemplified in Pogge’s and a range of other cosmopolitan accounts, is to compare an existing organ­ ization to an as-​ yet-​ unrealized institutional alternative that nonetheless [ 14 ]  Luis Cabrera

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should be considered feasible and morally obligatory to create. A  second method, which he sees as complementary, is to compare the effects of an existing organization to a situation in which it is absent, for example, where a state is not a member of it or where it is less active or powerful. Koenig-​ Archibugi adopts the latter approach, assessing impacts from international organizations on democratic consolidation and related individual rights. He reports findings of IGOs’ effects on domestic electoral contestation, quality or extensiveness of participation, deliberation, protection of civil rights, promotion of economic equality and workers’ rights, and availability of policy alternatives. He also draws links to cosmopolitan democracy in considering how membership in international organizations shapes a state’s ability to influence global decision-​making processes which could affect the interests of its population, and how entities such as the UN Security Council have the ability to subject a domestic population to coercion, including sanctions against individuals, without necessarily affording democratic input or due process. Overall, he says, the record is mixed. Some important patterns emerge, though. One is that the most powerful economic bodies—​the World Bank, IMF, and WTO—​appear to have a mostly positive effect on input variables associated with democracy, including the promotion of electoral contestation. At the same time, their actions are correlated with negative results on output variables, including core rights protections and human development indicators. He concludes, however, that there is reason for an integrative institutional cosmopolitan to be cautiously optimistic since the most durable effects of international organizations appear to be favorable for democratic consolidation within states.

1.4 SECTION III: COSMOPOLITAN INSTITUTIONS, FROM CITY TO WORLD STATE

In this section, the contributors examine ways in which cosmopolitan principles can inform the design of governing bodies, from the globally connected city, to a suprastate regional project such as the European Union, to some form of world government. Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz highlight a need to theorize cosmopolitan or global justice at the level of the city, in part given the importance such local governance has in the daily lives of most persons in the world. In this context, they advocate viewing global justice as a “scalable” concept, one that can be embodied in the most local of political bodies. They also seek to show how lessons about promoting substantive principles of justice locally can and should travel across state boundaries. They take as their site of investigation Medellín, Colombia, a city of 2 million long known for the challenges it faced as a focal point of the international Introduction 

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drug trade. Forman and Cruz highlight the significant gains the city has made in recent years toward transparent, citizen-​centered governance. They frame Medellín as a model for ways in which municipalities can advance egalitarian priorities consistent with moral cosmopolitanism. They see it as particularly notable for some ways in which both governance and public space have been transformed, with considerable investment devoted to historically marginalized areas. Ultimately, they argue, Medellín, with Bogotá; and Porto Alegre and Curitiba in Brazil, are cities which offer an important alternative to a top-​down, exclusionary model of urban development disseminated worldwide with the rise of neoliberalism. They see this alternative urban model as an important component of a comprehensively structured vision of cosmopolitan institutions. From the global city, we move to Philippe Van Parijs’s treatment of democratic practice in the evolving, suprastate regional project that is the European Union. In his chapter, Van Parijs frames the European Union as a momentous historical development in an integrative institutional cosmopolitan context, in that the European Parliament, composed of more than 750 representatives from 28 member-​states, makes fully global democracy “a bit less of a dream.”37 His primary concern is with what he sees as a problematic fit between the kinds of democratic institutions and practices the EU needs and the ones it actually has. He offers reforms based in a fundamentally instrumental approach to democracy. Binding participatory rule, Van Parijs argues, is primarily justified by its role in promoting good decisions, understood as ones which take all persons’ interests fairly into account. It does this in part through encouraging political candidates to be attentive to the concerns of broader segments of society. It also promotes public deliberation and justification for policy decisions, both of which expand input and encourage governance in the broad general interest. Finally, if the public perceives democratically enacted laws as legitimate, then compliance can be achieved at a much lower cost of enforcement. The key questions in EU democratic reform, he says, are to determine especially how to promote attentiveness, deliberation, and public justification on a regional scale—​to encourage European decision-​makers to gain knowledge from all sectors of the governed, and to adopt a discourse of fairness and impartiality for all. In other words, a central aim should be to promote, at the European regional level, the sort of cosmopolitan impartiality noted earlier in this chapter for the global level. He considers, but is skeptical of, a “demoi-​ cratic” strategy, which would make member-​states’ leaders or their national parliaments more central to Europe-​wide decision-​making. 37. The EU will have 27 member-​states after the United Kingdom completes its withdrawal, which was initiated following a 52–​48 percent victory for the “Leave” option in a 2016 national referendum.

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A better strategy, he suggests, is “demos-​cratic,” meaning one aimed in part at strengthening the European Parliament in relation to other EU-​level bodies. Such a move must be supplemented, however, by ones encouraging European-​level parliamentarians to engage in public dialogue and input-​ taking outside of their national or subnational constituencies. At the same time, to promote public perceptions of democratic legitimacy, some limited demoi-​cratic provisions likely will be necessary, including forms of guaranteed representation for national constituencies. Overall, Van Parijs offers a fine-​ grained analysis of how a concern to promote cosmopolitan impartiality actually could be embodied within institutional practice above the state. The chapters by Lu and Deudney are focused fundamentally on the global level. Lu, drawing in part on instrumental accounts of institutional cosmopolitanism, argues that those committed to democratic principles and values should also be explicitly committed to the creation of a world state, or a “global political authority that can command and enforce duties of cosmopolitan justice.” Her primary targets are democratic theorists who, while endorsing moral cosmopolitanism, continue to view the nation-​state as the morally appropriate home for realizing democratic principles of collective self-​ determination and egalitarian social justice. Her argument, however, also has implications for cosmopolitan democrats such as David Held. Lu identifies cosmopolitan justice as a subset of global justice: it guarantees the essential supporting conditions for basic moral reciprocity at the global level. She argues that, since the current global system falls well short of realizing cosmopolitan justice, the democratic forms of decision making at the domestic and global levels advocated by Held and others would not necessarily be legitimate. They would reflect the unjust global circumstances under which their form and procedures were negotiated. There must be significant progress toward cosmopolitan justice before any agreement on further terms of global justice, including global democracy, can be legitimate. Lu pits her instrumental account against claims that the advocacy of comprehensive integration among states, up to some fully integrated world state, gives too little importance to the value of collective self-​determination exercised by those in democratic states. To this, she responds that, far from being an enemy of collective self-​determination, world state formation is its enabling and legitimating condition—​though it will be a more limited form of self-​determination than is presumed justifiable in the current system. Claims to self-​determination involve claims over resources, collective rights, and duties in relation to other states. She argues that, in the absence of a world state to serve as an impartial arbiter in the global sphere, determining states’ rights and duties with respect to cosmopolitan justice, self-​determination claims cannot be authoritatively settled or legitimized. Further, Lu says, the development of a unified global political structure should make possible a

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much greater pluralism of (legitimately) self-​determining communities, above and below the nation-​state. Deudney argues that increasingly intensive forms of interdependence have in fact rendered some key tenets of moral cosmopolitanism obsolete. Current cosmopolitan arguments, he notes, depend on the existence of insider/​ outsider distinctions for much of their moral force. Cosmopolitan impartiality means giving the interests of foreigners much the same foundational weight as the interests of compatriots in determining distributive and other obligations. For Deudney, however, processes of globalization—​particularly those posing potentially grave threats to human existence—​have advanced so far that such insider/​outsider and compatriot/​foreigner distinctions have broken down. In material terms, though not necessarily collective attitudes, the world has genuinely become a single “global village.” Thus, it is mistaken to focus theoretical efforts on cosmopolitan duties owed to those in other states. Rather, the focus should be on what unifies all within a “terrapolitan” frame, and on working out actions and duties consistent with a fully global, and fully collective, enlightened self-​interest. After offering an instructive analysis of how understandings of global geography and levels of global interdependence shaped the “first cosmopolitanism” of the Stoic era and the “second cosmopolitanism” of Kant and the Enlightenment, Deudney assesses challenges to the “third cosmopolitanism” in a terrapolitan system, as well as some contributions it still can make. In this system, he says, the fundamental concern is not with injustices perpetrated by the global affluent or powerful, but with actions by all persons that will contribute, even if unintentionally, to existential threats. Such threats include not only the continuing risk of planetary-​scale destruction from nuclear weapons, but also devastating climate change and the potential development of an artificial superintelligence. While none are now outsiders in the sense that cosmopolitans presume, he says, the approach still can serve as an important global counterweight against tendencies toward oligarchy and a devaluing of the human. Deudney asserts that the threats to human survival in a terrapolitan age “almost certainly require the erection of some version of substantial world government.” Elsewhere, he has prescribed a limited form of world government or “nuclear restraint union” capable of addressing the threat of devastating nuclear war.38 A terrapolitan approach, cognizant of other material threats and means by which physical space has shrunk and been transformed, could point in the direction of more highly elaborated global political and security institutions.

38. See Daniel H. Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), at 254–​64. [ 18 ]  Luis Cabrera

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1.5 CONCLUSION

Each of the contributions to this volume explores the roles that institutional rules and agents can play in a cosmopolitan approach. Each is concerned to a significant extent with engaging Laski’s claim that a sovereign state system “is incompatible with the interests of humanity.”39 Some chapters, notably those in Section I, reject such an incompatibility claim and seek to address injustices by reforming states and inducing their governments to observe principles of popular sovereignty, or more outward-​facing, expressly cosmopolitan principles, in their foreign policy actions. Beardsworth and Shapcott in particular see states not as perennial obstacles to achieving cosmopolitan aims, but as collective agents with the potential to advance those aims in significant ways. Caney, Cabrera, and Koenig-​Archibugi in Section II take Laski’s assertion more to heart and are more skeptical that a sovereign states system can be compatible with efforts to realize cosmopolitan aims. Thus, each asks far-​ reaching questions about the kinds of system transformation that should be pursued, and how. Caney and Cabrera both presume that some wholesale global integration is needed, and both are concerned ultimately with the legitimacy of strongly empowered, fully global political institutions and the principles that should guide their development and operation. Koenig-​ Archibugi asks whether our experiences to date with institutions of global governance give us reason to think that an integrative institutional cosmopolitanism actually would help to promote cosmopolitan aims, including democracy. Authors in the final section of the volume are concerned not only with state sovereignty, but also with the ultimate compatibility of some nonstate agents with cosmopolitanism. Forman and Cruz highlight the importance of theorizing the city within a cosmopolitan frame, and Van Parijs does the same for the suprastate region, in part as a testing ground for what might be possible in a fully integrated global political system. Lu offers a new reading of state self-​determination in which states would not be seen as equal sovereign agents able to decide in their own cases, but rather would be embedded in a system with the authority to limit their actions according to the legitimate moral interests of other agents. Deudney argues that the sovereign states system, and a cosmopolitanism which seeks to break down its insider/​outsider injustices, are both outdated. The world is already one, and the point is to make it more sustainable for humanity. Overall, the contributions here raise a host of important questions about the defensibility of current institutional configurations, the powers that

39. Laski, A Grammar of Politics, 64.

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institutional bodies do and should control, and the ultimate shape of a global institutional order which would give due emphasis to the interests of all persons. Each chapter offers answers that are distinctive, and often provocative or surprising. As a whole, the contributions should significantly advance understandings of cosmopolitan institutional concerns and possibilities for reform.

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I

Cosmopolitanism and the Sovereign State

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CHAPTER 2

Popular Resource Sovereignty LEIF WENAR  

2.1 INTRODUCTION

The premodern, or “Westphalian” state system gave effective sovereigns nearly unlimited legal authority to abuse and neglect their subjects, as well as the inhabitants of the lands they conquered. As this system cracked during the slow-​motion collapse of empires in the early twentieth century, three other principles were vigorously advanced for distributing power among human beings. Lenin and his successors proposed to structure the world by class; Hitler and the Japanese militarists pressed instead for race.1 The third principle, and up to now the most successful, was the principle of popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty became a basic principle of the modern international system, whose primary documents are the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While popular sovereignty has clearly not replaced all aspects of Westphalia, it was the rallying cry of the liberation of the colonies, the struggle against apartheid, and the great historical waves that have transformed most countries into electoral democracies.2 Insofar as the world has heroes—​Gandhi and Mandela—​they are heroes of the self-​ determination of peoples. As Amartya Sen says, “While popular sovereignty is not yet universally practiced, nor indeed universally accepted, in the general    This chapter draws on Leif Wenar, Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules That Run the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 1.  For Japanese imperial racism, see John Dower, War Without Mercy (New York: Random House, 1987), Part 3. As Dower details, there was a great deal of wartime racism among the Allies as well. 2. See, e.g., Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2018 (Washington, DC: Freedom House).

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climate of world opinion democratic governance has achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.”3 Because it treats its units, self-​determining national peoples, as formally equal, the modern international system can adjust as power shifts among them. Because it has encouraged democracy and discouraged aggression, the modern international system has seen rates of death by armed struggle decrease remarkably, perhaps to the lowest levels in recorded history.4 What should cheer institutional cosmopolitans further is the potential of self-​determining peoples to reach increasingly more cosmopolitan goals. We already see significant sharing of power across large patches of the Earth’s surface, with merged political sovereignty, as in the European Union (EU); economic integration, as in the North American Free Trade Agreement and Mercosur; and hundreds of subject-​specific agreements and agencies.5 If the United Nations is ever to be replaced or supplemented by the United Persons, the continuation of this trajectory through the free association of peoples must be the most likely peaceful path. To create conditions for peoples to grow more together, and so to achieve any institutionally cosmopolitan future, individuals must become more connective than they are now: more tolerant, more trusting, and better informed about each other. This is true especially for individuals within countries that today suffer the “resource curse” of authoritarianism, civil conflict, and large-​scale corruption. The resource curse is vivid in the past and present of many states: in Gulf oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Iran, for example, and in the “Big Five” African oil producers: Algeria, Angola, Libya, Nigeria, and Sudan/​South Sudan. The political economies of resource-​cursed states pressure individuals away from the conditions that cosmopolitans require for their institutional ideals to be feasible, and so should be a matter of special concern to them, even beyond the suffering and injustice within those states. Political relationships in resource-​cursed countries tend not to be tolerant, horizontal relations among individuals. In countries suffering the resource curse of authoritarianism, these are rather coercive vertical relations of violence and dependence between the regime and individuals.

3.  Amartya Sen, “Democracy as a Universal Value,” Journal of Democracy 10 (1999), 3–​17. 4. See the Human Security Report 2013 (Vancouver: Human Security Report Project, 2014). See also Christopher Fettweis, “Unipolarity, Hegemony, and the New Peace,” Security Studies 26 (2017), 423–​51; Joshua Goldstein, Winning the War on War:  The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (London: Penguin, 2011). For a review of the democratic peace literature, see Jarrod Hayes, “Review Article: The Democratic Peace and the New Evolution of an Old Idea,” European Journal of International Relations 18 (2012), 767–​91. 5. Thomas Hale, David Held, and Kevin Young, Gridlock (London: Polity Press, 2013). [ 24 ] Leif Wenar

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The resource-​enriched regime maintains power through forceful forms of divide-​and-​r ule, discouraging both political activity and civil society, and accentuating antagonisms between regions, religions, and tribes. Because the regime typically exerts control over the media, the population may be soaked in extremist ideologies or cults of personality while having less access to alternative points of view. In resource-​cursed authoritarian countries, citizens may be poor and defenseless or better-​off and dependent, but in any case, they are usually controlled and divided. Violent conflict is latent; trust is low. In countries suffering the resource curse of civil conflict, such as Syria or Libya, relations among individuals are often even worse. To whatever extent an institutionally cosmopolitan future will arrive, this will require individuals who are capable of deliberating together across the features that distinguish them. For that to be possible, individuals in resource-​cursed countries will need to become much more democratically capable than they now are, more knowledgeable about deliberative processes, more accepting of other ways of life, and more willing to bear costs for the sake of successful collective procedures. The surest ways we know to develop those capacities are within the institutions of popular sovereignty that are already available and indeed proven in all parts of the world. The most influential cosmopolitans hold that the self-​determination of subsets of humanity—​of individuals associating freely to determine their common future—​has value, so long as it is made compatible with the rights of others.6 Moving control over resources away from authoritarians and militias and toward sovereign peoples will better realize that value. Those who wish to see power spread still further should see greater popular resource sovereignty as a stage along their way.

2.2 POWER TO THE PEOPLE

The people of a country should have the ultimate authority over their country. As we consider a commitment to popular resource sovereignty, we want to know what we would be committing to. Who are the people, what kind of authority should they have, and over what?

6.  For example, Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1999), 92–​104; Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005), 177–​81; Thomas Pogge, “Self-​Constituting Constituencies to Enhance Freedom, Equality, and Participation in Democratic Procedures,” Theoria 99 (2002), 26–​54.

P op u l a r R e s o u r c e S o v e r e i g n t y  

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The suggestion of this chapter is that popular sovereignty is set out in these principles: 1. All peoples have the right of self-​determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development. 2. All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources. These words begin Article 1 of both of the two main human rights treaties (the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights).7 The two human rights treaties are the codification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and almost all of humanity lives in a country that has accepted one of these treaties as law. The UN Charter is sometimes called the “Constitution of the modern international system”; the Universal Declaration and these two human rights treaties are its Bill of Rights.8 We will be exploring the meaning of these principles of popular sovereignty, especially the principle for natural wealth and resources. One initial point of interest is that the principles of popular sovereignty enjoy pride of place in these human rights treaties—​they are showcased in Article 1. Popular sovereignty is a human right. There are different views about the relations between this group right of peoples and the individual human rights in the treaties, such as the rights to liberty and security and the right to vote.9 The UN Human Rights Committee opines that popular sovereignty “is an essential condition for the effective guarantee and observance of individual human rights and for the promotion and strengthening of those rights.” The distinguished jurist Antonio Cassese also favors the other direction of support:  “When the rights and fundamental freedoms of members of a people are systematically denied this means that the right to self-​determination of that people is also infringed.”10 We need not choose among these relations among rights here. 7.  International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 999 UNTS 171 (1966); International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), 993 UNTS 3 (1966). 8. Bruno Fassbender, The United Nations Charter as the Constitution of the International Community (Leiden: Brill, 2009); OHCHR, “The International Bill of Human Rights,” Fact Sheet 2 (1996), http://​www.ohchr.org/​Documents/​Publications/​FactSheet2Rev.1en.pdf. 9. ICCPR Articles 9 and 25. Self-​determination is not the only group right mentioned in the treaties: the family (ICCPR Article 23; ICESCR Article 10) is said to have entitlements, and the crime of genocide (ICCPR, Article 6) is a crime against a group. The rights of states are also, of course, group rights in just the same way as are the rights of peoples. 10.  UN Human Rights Committee, “General Comment 12, Article 1 (Twenty-​first Session, 1984),” Compilation of General Comments and General Recommendations Adopted by Human Rights Treaty Bodies, UN Doc. HRI/​GEN/​1/​Rev.1 at 12 (1994), para. 1. Antonio Cassese, Self-​Determination of Peoples:  A Legal Reappraisal (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995), 298. [ 26 ] Leif Wenar

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We might rather only recall that human rights are meant to limit the power of the modern state to abuse and neglect those within its domain, and also to give political expression to the dignity of all persons.

2.3 POPULAR RESOURCE SOVEREIGNTY

Popular resource sovereignty is part of popular sovereignty. The second paragraph of Article 1 of the human rights treaties states, “All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources.” France belongs to the French; Canada’s resources belong to the Canadian people; Angola’s resources belong to the Angolan people, and so on. Saying that the people own the resources of their country pulls on a few cognitive knots, which we will soon untie. First, let us register how natural it is to speak in this way. As Bob Graham, former senator and governor of Florida, once said, “There is a fundamental fact that the oil and gas off our shores is an American asset. It belongs to the people of the United States of America.”11 If it were found that Cuba had drilled a long, diagonal pipeline through the Gulf of Mexico and was now siphoning American oil, the American people would immediately (and perhaps literally) be up in arms. The oil within the territory of the United States belongs to the American people, and foreigners must not take it without permission. Popular resource sovereignty also explains why we would be outraged by the private theft of a country’s resources. In the years leading up to the Reagan administration, companies like Shell discovered large oil deposits off the coasts of Louisiana and Florida. One can imagine the public response had President Reagan secretly sold this oil to Shell and then put the profits into his private bank account and ordered the FBI to silence any critics. America’s natural resources start out in the hands of the American people, and must not be disposed of in ways that wholly bypass their approval.12 The principle that the people of the country own the resources of the country is affirmed in many national constitutions and laws—​even in nations where the principle is flouted in fact13

11. E&E TV, “Oil & Gas: Spill Panel Releases Offshore Drilling Recommendations,” January 12, 2011, www.eenews.net/​tv/​videos/​1264/​transcript. 12. What Congress actually did in 1982 was to start a system of public auctions for drilling leases in US coastal waters. These auctions send the proceeds from resource sales into the national treasury, and that auction system is still in place today. 13.  Angolan Law N.  13/​78 (1989); Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, 1992, Art. 17; Equatorial Guinea, Hydrocarbons Law no. 8/​2006 (2006), Preliminary Recitals.

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All deposits of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons which exist underground or on the continental shelf within the national territory . . . belong to the Angolan People. The land, forests, rivers and lakes, water sources, underground natural resources, resources in the territorial waters, on the continental shelf and in the air space . . . fall under the ownership of the entire [Vietnamese] people. The fundamental Law of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea consecrates and designates as the property of the people of Equatorial Guinea all resources found in our national territory . . . It is by the mandate and delegation of the people, to whom these resources legitimately belong, that the Government undertakes to manage them.

The Iraqi constitution declares, “Oil and gas are owned by the people of Iraq in all the regions and provinces.”14 President George W. Bush and many in his administration emphasized this principle (“The oil belongs to the Iraqi people. It’s their asset.”)15 Tony Blair asserted the more general principle (“Iraq’s natural resources remain the property of the people of Iraq.”)16 Indeed, there is an extraordinary consensus among national leaders on popular resource sovereignty, at least at the rhetorical level, even among leaders of radically different political orientations:17 What we say is that when it comes to the mineral resources of Australia, the Australian people own those resources.—​Kevin Rudd, prime minister of Australia 14. Constitution of Iraq, Article 111. 15.  “President’s Remarks to the Travel Pool After Meeting with Interagency Team on Iraq,” June 12, 2006; see also Bush’s preinvasion address to the American people: “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation” March 17, 2003. Several Bush administration officials echoed the assertion of Iraqi popular resource sovereignty, including Colin Powell when he was US secretary of state (Nick Paton Walsh, “US Begins Secret Talks to Secure Iraq’s Oilfields,” The Guardian, January 23, 2003). 16. The Telegraph, “Tony Blair’s Statement,” March 17, 2003. 17. Australian Government, “Prime Minister Transcript of Doorstop Interview, Geelong Hospital 7 May 2010,” http://​pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/​browse.php?did=17284. Jeb Blount and Adriana Brasileiro, “Tupi Oil Imperiled as Price Drop Unravels Energy Plan,” http://​www.bloomberg.com/​apps/​news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aszdg.tiMLMs. John Paul Rathborne and Eduardo Garcia, “Mexico Opens up Its Energy Sector,” Financial Times, August 12, 2013. Associated Press, “Chavez: Our Oil Reserve Does Not Belong to Mr. Bush,” March 8, 2005. President of Azerbaijan, “Ilham Aliyev Attended the Opening of a New Settlement for 423 Idp Families in Shaki.” British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), “Iran Wields Oil Embargo Threat,” http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​ business/​1912795.stm. World Bulletin, “Libyan Officials Oppose Gaddafi Oil Money Plan,” http://​www.worldbulletin.net/​index.php?aType=haber&ArticleID=31318. Mark John and Kwasi Kpodo, “Ghana Bids to Break Africa’s Oil Curse,” Reuters, May 26, 2010, https://​www.reuters.com/​article/​frontiers-​ghana-​idAFJOH43215120100526. Norwegian Ministry for Petroleum and Energy, “An Industry for the Future—​Norway’s Petroleum Activities,” (Oslo, 2011), 5. [ 28 ] Leif Wenar

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The oil belongs to 190 million Brazilians, and we will show everyone that the oil is ours.—​Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil All hydrocarbons will remain the property of the Mexican people.—​ Enrique Peña Nieto, president of Mexico The oil belongs to the Venezuelan people.—​Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela The oil belongs to the people of Azerbaijan.—​Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan The oil belongs to the people.—​Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran There is no ruse here. People cannot be fooled. This oil belongs to the Libyans.—​Muammar Gaddafi, head of Libya The [oil] resource belongs to the people of Ghana.—​John Mahama, president of Ghana Norway’s petroleum resources belong to the Norwegian people.—​The Parliament of Norway Like popular sovereignty generally, popular resource sovereignty is all the world’s ideal. Elites tell their people that the people own the resources, and elites tell each other’s people that the people own the resources. Yet popular resource sovereignty is not all the world’s reality. Why not? Three reasons: The first, and most obvious, is self-​interest; political elites have the most direct control over the international system, and many in those elites do not want to give power (instead of words) to the people of their own and others’ countries. Second, like any principle, popular resource sovereignty can, if overweighted, strain at the design constraints of the international system. Third and most important, the meaning of the principle of popular resource sovereignty is not settled—​it is not certain what it would require as a matter of law. The first reason cycles through the other two: it is in the interests of elites to muddy the meaning of popular resource sovereignty as much as possible, and to intimate, even fulminate, that the principle contains dangers.18 We find ourselves in a fortunate point in history. We have inherited texts that explain in a straightforward way the meaning of popular resource sovereignty and how it meshes with the other principles of the international system. With the texts that we have, we can cut these three reasons down to 18. A fourth reason, the fear that action toward popular resource sovereignty would destabilize the world trade system, can be addressed once possible policy reforms can be scrutinized. See Leif Wenar, “Fighting the Resource Curse,” Global Policy 4 (2013), 298–​304.

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one:  the self-​interest of elites. The texts that history has given us are none other than the human rights treaties that we have seen. History, through its cunning, has already given us the legal texts that should be law. All that needs adding is belief in their plain meaning. Our good fortune with texts is captured by Hegel’s famous Doppelsatz: “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.”19 What is rational is actual: the most plausible principle of popular resource sovereignty is embodied in the international legal documents that most states are already party to. And what is actual is rational: there is a natural, even obvious, interpretation of the international legal documents that explains popular resource sovereignty and integrates it with other priorities in the international system. The world has agreed on the doctrine that it needs.

2.4 THE ALPHA AND OMEGA OF THE COVENANTS

Here again is the text from common Article 1 of the main human rights treaties: 1. All peoples have the right of self-​determination. By virtue of that right, they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. 2. All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources. More than six out of seven states are already party to at least one of these human rights treaties, including all the states in the Americas, Europe, and Africa, except a few small islands; and nearly every country in Asia, including China and India. The rejectionist countries are mainly absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, as well as over a dozen microstates like Tuvalu. Leaving aside countries of less than 1 million, we find 95 percent of states are party to one of the covenants. Counting persons instead of nations, we find a full 98 percent of humanity lives in a country that has accepted the text given here as law.20 As a matter of law, nearly everyone is already part of a people that has affirmed the human right to self-​determination. The principle of popular resource sovereignty, the second principle, is the focus of this study. It is significant that this principle appears in Article 1 of both human rights treaties. It is also useful that the principle appears again in the last substantive article of each treaty:21 19. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 20. 20. See UN Treaty Collection, https://​treaties.un.org/​Home.aspx?lang=en. 21. ICCPR Art. 47; ICESCR Art. 25. [ 30 ] Leif Wenar

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Nothing in the present Covenant shall be interpreted as impairing the inherent right of all peoples to enjoy and utilize fully and freely their natural wealth and resources.

Popular resource sovereignty is stated at the beginning and the end—​it is the alpha and the omega of the major human rights treaties. Popular resource sovereignty is the only right in the human rights treaties that is declared, as if for emphasis, twice. As for the meaning of the principle, the treaties helpfully supply these two different formulations. If we ask the treaties what it means to say that the people “may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources,” then the treaties themselves answer that the people have an inherent “right . . . to enjoy and utilize fully and freely their natural wealth and resources.” The meaning of these passages is central to our inquiry, and the most natural first assumption is that they mean what they say.22 The people of each country have the right freely to control the resources of their country.

2.5 POWER TO THE CITIZENS

“On the surface it sounded reasonable,” complained a British administrator sent to the colony of Ceylon, “let the people decide. In fact it was ridiculous because the people cannot decide until someone decides who are the people.”23 Maurice Cranston is even more cantankerous: The human rights treaties, he says,24 [i]‌ncreased confusion by introducing as Article I the old stalking horse of German nationalists, Victorian idealists, and President Woodrow Wilson:  “All peoples have the right of self-​determination.” . . . But what constitutes a “people”? Are the inhabitants of Provence or Quebec or Wales or Brittany a people? Each is undoubtedly an ethnic group, distinct in some ways from the other inhabitants of the political society to which it at present belongs. Do the inhabitants of those areas have a right to independence that the governments of France, Canada, and the United Kingdom ought to concede?

22.  This assumption is supported by the general rule for interpreting treaties:  “A treaty shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in the light of its object and purpose,” Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (the “treaty on treaties”), Article 31, in United Nations, Treaty Series, 1155 (1980), 331–​512 at 340. 23.  Lee Buchheit, Secession (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1978), 9. See Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1999), 106. 24. Maurice Cranston, “Are There Any Human Rights?” Daedalus 112(1983): 1–​15, at 8.

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Mention of the rights of “the people” can start a stampede of such ill-​ tempered critiques. Still, while some will try to buffalo us on popular sovereignty, we need not panic. The word “people” has various applications, but so do many words—​including the word “state.” And “state” is a word that all in the international elite claim to understand. So elite attempts to make mischief around the meaning of “people” merely rebound onto them. Is the state system ridiculous because the states cannot decide until someone decides who are the states? Are Taiwan, Kosovo, Somaliland, and Donetsk states? And who exactly is the someone who decides? Luckily, there is no call to obfuscate at all. In our fortunate point in history, “people” in Article 1 just means the people of an independent country. And the people of an independent country is made of all its citizens. It is the citizens of the country who should have the ultimate authority over their country. The simple answer is the right one: that is, popular sovereignty.25 The question “Who is a people?” was harder before the independence of the colonies. Before decolonization, no one knew, for example, that Tanganyikans and Zanzibaris would shortly become citizens of a new country, Tanzania. With the independence of the colonies, these questions have now been settled. Once the colonies became independent, the question of who belongs to which fully self-​determining people becomes the question of who is a citizen of which state—​not a trivial question, but a tractable one. To make popular sovereignty work today, international actors still need to agree on who is a citizen during military occupations, but this they can do. (No one doubted, for instance, who was an Iraqi citizen during the US occupation of 2003–​2004.) International actors also need to keep track of unifications (East and West Germany) and secessions (South Sudan from Sudan), which they have shown they can do. The plight of stateless persons is of great moral concern, meriting much more international attention than it gets. Yet statelessness is a second-​order problem of indeterminacy—​within a first-​order system that is 99.8 percent determinate regarding which individuals are citizens of which states.26 This leaves us with Cranston’s question of whether the inhabitants of Quebec or Wales or Brittany are a people. We can happily say yes. We can gladly accept that the Ijaw of Nigeria are a people, as are the Cofán of Ecuador and the Uighurs in China. These are “peoples within a people”—​just as federal systems like the United States, Germany, and Malaysia have “states within a state.” (Q:  How many states are within the borders of the Unites States? A: 51—​the 50 states, plus the United States.) Many subnational peoples enjoy 25. See Cassese, Self-​Determination of Peoples, 59–​61. 26.  The UN Refugee Agency estimates that there are 10  million stateless persons worldwide, within a global population of 7 billion. UNHCR, “An Introduction to Statelessness,” http://​www.unhcr.org/​pages/​49c3646c155.html. [ 32 ] Leif Wenar

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special rights within their national political systems: for example, the people of Quebec have crafted distinctive laws regarding the public use of the French language, and the Welsh have their own parliament. The rights of such peoples are quite varied across countries, and there are few generalizations to be made, except that there has been some progress in the recognition of indigenous people’s rights in North America and Australia, and there has been movement in Western Europe toward greater autonomy for national minorities such as the Scots and the Catalans. The question, then, is which rights international law should ascribe to subnational or cross-​national peoples. Cranston’s suggestion that all such peoples might be internationally recognized as having a right to complete independence has been repeatedly rejected, because it raises the specter of multiple and conflicting claims to independent territory—​claims that are well beyond the international system’s capacity to resolve. The ICCPR sets a more modest baseline, which is securing members of minority groups rights against serious forms of discrimination and harassment:27 In those states in which ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language.

In a lucid survey, Will Kymlicka charts efforts since the 1990s to go beyond these covenant rights and gain subnational peoples greater status in transnational law—​especially rights to self-​government within territories that have some autonomy from the national state.28 These efforts were motivated by a combination of a sense of the injustices inflicted on subnational peoples in the past, a humanitarian concern for the condition of many of them in the present, and an ambition to extend liberal multicultural ideals beyond the stable democracies in which those ideas had developed. Kymlicka reports that these efforts have so far met with limited and perhaps temporary success, for interesting reasons. After 1990, international law made progress in recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples (such as the Australian aboriginal peoples and the Inuit of Canada) to govern their traditional territories. Yet efforts to recognize rights of nonindigenous national minorities failed because of realistic fears among responsible advocates that recognizing such rights would ignite regional armed conflicts. Advocates also became concerned that greater territorial autonomy would leave the human 27. ICCPR, Art. 27. 28. Will Kymlicka, “Minority Rights in Political Philosophy and International Law,” in John Tasioulas and Samantha Besson, eds., The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 377–​96.

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rights of vulnerable individuals unprotected within the proposed autonomous territories. As a consequence of the progress in gaining rights for indigenous peoples and the failure of other efforts, Kymlicka continues, groups worldwide became incentivized to redefine themselves as indigenous peoples. This is currently putting an expansionary pressure on that legal category that is “likely to lead to the collapse of the international system of indigenous rights.”29 The difficulties that these efforts have encountered are interesting because they do not derive from a lack of good intentions, ideas, or opportunities. Those pushing for international legal status for subnational peoples have been theoretically sophisticated and morally motivated, and their proposals have typically received a sympathetic hearing. Yet they have found—​so far—​that their proposals have inadvertently threatened other quite weighty values, such as peace and human rights themselves. And advocates have so far been unable to define an operational category that demarcates the minority groups that do and do not merit special status, given the incentives that any categorization will create. Thus, their efforts have not been thwarted mainly by realpolitik, but rather by serious problems of institutional design that appear (at least at the current level of global coordinative capacity) difficult to overcome. The international system’s first-​order ideal is to distribute power to the people of independent states—​that is, to their citizens. The system has made limited and perhaps temporary progress in addressing the important second-​ order problems of the status of subnational peoples. Kymlicka’s recommendation is to continue to work within the existing system on the second-​order problems of institutional design:  to continue to improve the international regimes for indigenous peoples and national minorities. The alternative would be to press for a different first-​order ideal—​a different model for the distribution of political power among individuals—​that would yield better results for subnational peoples. The challenges facing this alternative approach will be scaled-​up versions of the problems that Kymlicka describes. The challenges are to give reasonable assurances that the actual operation of a different first-​ order system would better secure major values like peace and the protection of human rights, given the incentives that the proposed institutional design will create. These are significant challenges, and so far, we do not have proposals that look likely to meet them. The same can be said of suggestions that present state boundaries themselves should be redrawn or erased to expand democratic participation toward the global level.30 Debates over such suggestions may become urgent in the 29. Kymlicka, “Minority Rights,” 394. 30.  For surveys and recent proposals, see Daniele Archibugi, Mathias Koenig-​ Archibugi, and Raffaele Marchetti, eds, Global Democracy:  Normative and Empirical Perspectives (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011); Luis Cabrera, “Individual Rights and the Democratic Boundary Problem,” International Theory 6(2) (2014): 224–​54. [ 34 ] Leif Wenar

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future, when more specific institutional schemes have been fleshed out and defended. As yet, proponents of “globalizing democracy” are only at the early phase of identifying the values (such as individual autonomy or equality) that on paper might be furthered by possible reforms. In this phase, “globalizers” are assuming that the realized achievements of the postwar state system—​in terms of democratization, the reduction of severe poverty, declines in interstate and intrastate conflict, and so on—​will persist or increase while borders are redrawn or removed. These assumptions will need to be redeemed as their proposals mature. To take one example, globalizers as yet have said almost nothing about the primary question of where their reforms would relocate control over today’s highly destructive weapons—​a question that their favored example of democratic expansion, the European Union, has never faced. In the reformed world, who has control over the nuclear weapons, the cruise missiles, and the drones? (And if the answer is “nobody,” then how does that disarmament happen?) Globalizing proposals are still on the drawing board on such basic issues of modern politics; we will need from them more detail on how they will keep the peace and keep the lights on.31 Until more complete proposals can be evaluated, responsible cosmopolitans will look for progressive procedures within the state system that can preserve the gains of the system that we have, while fostering improvements where it is imperfect. This is what Cabrera calls “movement toward the creation of larger democratic polities or citizen sets through projects of just, democratically accountable economic and political integration.”32 What can reasonably be hoped for in the long term is that today’s states will freely integrate—​and this, in turn, returns us to the topics of the resource curse, of improving the coordinative capacity of today’s individuals, and of the meaning of popular resource sovereignty.

2.6 THE LAW OF PEOPLES

Popular resource sovereignty—​the principle that “all peoples shall, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources”—​is one dimension of popular sovereignty. We continue to probe the text from the human rights treaties by asking what are the “natural wealth and resources” that peoples may dispose of, and what it means to say that these things are “theirs.”

31.  See Mathias Risse’s forceful critique of utopian thinking in On Global Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 315–​18. 32. Luis Cabrera, Political Theory of Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State (London: Routledge, 2004), 2.

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Mischief can be made out of the relation between a people and resources because the relations here are all jumbled. “The central core notion of a prop­ erty right in x,” wrote Robert Nozick, “is the right to determine what shall be done with x.”33 Yet this is also the central core notion of a sovereignty right in x.  Property and sovereignty, ownership and rule—​which did Lincoln mean when he said, “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it”?34 And there are further conundrums too. If “this country” belongs to the people, does that mean the country’s land, its resources, its institutions, all of the above, or something else? We are looking at different types of control, and several things being controlled; we need to make distinctions. Here, Latin terms and etymologies will not help us; indeed, they make things worse. Salmond’s Jurisprudence attempts to link sovereignty with imperium and ownership with dominium.35 Yet dominium (Latin for “lord”) can itself indicate a relation of either sovereignty or property. Since 1659, France and Spain have shared sovereignty over Pheasant Island, making it a “condominium” in the sovereignty sense in international law—​but not in the property law sense of “condominium” familiar from many apartment buildings. Semantic seepage is also seen with the word “territory” (from territorium, meaning “land belonging to”). One might wish to keep “territory” as a purely political term: territory is the area over which a sovereign exercises authority. Yet, then, what to make of the italicized terms in the “territory clause” of the US Constitution:  “The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States”?36 The concepts have grown into a mare’s nest. The tangle of concepts and words abets those bent on mischief, and it would be fruitless to try to regiment how people talk. Instead, we can just define our own terms so they express the meaning of popular resource sovereignty as we understand it: • Sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territory. To have sovereignty means to have jurisdiction: the right to authorize laws. A modern sovereign has personal jurisdiction: the right to authorize laws valid for citizens, wherever they are. A modern sovereign also has territorial jurisdiction: the right to authorize laws as valid for everyone within a specified physical space. A sovereign’s territory is the physical space over which that sovereign has the right to

33. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 171. 34. Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural (March 4, 1861). 35. John Salmond, Jurisprudence, 7th ed. (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1924), 554. 36. United States Constitution, Art. IV, Sec. 3. On the relations between these terms, with historical background, see generally the Australian High Court’s judgment in Mabo v. Queensland (No 2) ([1992] HCA 23) and the International Court of Justice’s Western Sahara opinion [9 General List no. 61, (1974–​1975)]. [ 36 ] Leif Wenar

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•

•

•

•

authorize laws. Territorial jurisdiction—​the right to authorize laws valid in a space—​is the core of modern political authority.37 Jurisdiction and property. One dimension of territorial jurisdiction is the right to authorize property laws. Property laws define property rights and establish property entitlements. The paradigm of a property right is an alienable and waivable right to the exclusive use of some nonbodily object or to the exclusive occupation of some space.38 Sovereignty and natural resources. Within any territory, there will be natural resources: nonmanufactured and unprocessed nonhuman objects with a value in use. One part of a sovereign’s territorial jurisdiction is the right to authorize laws for natural resources. For example, a law may specify, as in the United States, that the rights to extract oil under public land will be auctioned off to private bidders, with the revenues going into the national treasury. Or rights over oil can be granted to a national oil company, as in Mexico in 1938. Or the law may vest title to oil in the Crown, as in Britain, while management of the resource is assigned to a government ministry. Or the law can require that oil be left in the ground. Any of these laws and others are possible: a sovereign has the legal right to free disposition of the resources of its territory. Popular sovereignty over land and resources. When the people are sovereign, the land (the country) “belongs” to the people, in the sense that the people have the ultimate right to authorize laws for that territory. All the country’s natural resources also “belong” to the people, in this sense: the people have the jurisdictional right (as the covenants say) to “freely dispose of” these resources—​the right “to enjoy and utilize” them “fully and freely.” One implication of “free disposition” is that without a valid law, no one can gain ownership of resources—​and with a valid law, the people can create any property rights it chooses. Property in land and resources. The land (the Earth’s surface and subsurface) “belongs” to the people in a second sense—​the sense that the land is a natural resource. All of a territory’s natural resources are property originally vested in the people; as the human rights treaties say, these are “their” resources. The resources originally belong to the people: at independence, the

37.  A  modern sovereign also has metajurisdictional rights over its territory. One metajurisdictional right is the right to control the territory’s borders:  to determine who can enter and exit the territory. Another metajurisdictional right is the right to border change: to abandon, transfer, or acquire territory. When we speak of jurisdictional rights from now on, we include these metajurisdictional entitlements. See Allen Buchanan, “Boundaries:  What Liberalism Has to Say,” in Allen Buchanan and Margaret Moore, eds., States, Nations, and Borders:  The Ethics of Making Boundaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 231–​61. 38. Here, “nonbodily” means “not presently part of a human body” (for instance, one may sell cut hair).

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resources start out in the people’s hands. The natural resources of a country are, as the UN General Assembly once put it, the people’s “birthright.”39 It is simple to show that a sovereign people has original property rights in their natural resources. It would be odd to say that natural resources within a national territory are originally unowned. In 1975, Shell discovered the Cognac oil field in US territorial waters, 100 miles offshore from New Orleans. No one ventured that Shell’s discovery was an “original acquisition” of unowned resources—​what Shell found was, of course, a resource that already had an owner. The American people’s original property right explains why Shell had to ask the US government for permission to drill into Cognac, and why Shell had to pay into the US national treasury for each barrel of oil extracted from it. (Recall Senator Graham’s words, “There is a fundamental fact that the oil and gas off our shores is an American asset. It belongs to the people of the United States of America.”) It would be even stranger to say that a country’s natural resources are originally held by some other owner, such as the country’s government, considered as separate from its citizens. If Scotland someday becomes independent, no one will think that the new Scottish government initially owns the North Sea oil, holding the rights to sell off that oil and spend the revenues, even against the wishes of the Scottish people. The natural assumption is that the people is initially seised of the resources, and the government is the fiduciary of the people, managing their assets for them (on which more will be said later in this chapter). The people start off owning the nation’s resources, and thereafter, the people have the right to freely dispose of them. Without a valid law, no one can rightly own the nation’s resources but the people. With a valid law, anyone can come to own them. We see the people exercising their right to dispose of their natural resources differently within different national laws. For example, the Mexican constitution says:40 The Nation has an original right of property over the land and waters within the boundaries of the national territory. The Nation has and will have the right to transfer its property’s domain to private individuals in order to create private property rights.

39. UN General Assembly, Resolution 34/​92 (December 12, 1979), paragraph 3. 40.  Constitution of Mexico, Article 27. This article further specifies, “The Nation owns what follows:  all natural resources at both the continental platform and the islands’ seafloor  .  .  .  all the oil and all solid, liquid, and gaseous hydrocarbons.” The Mexican constitution carefully distinguishes “the Nation” (la Nación) from “the State” (el Estado). [ 38 ] Leif Wenar

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Meanwhile, Zambia’s constitution sets itself against privatization:41 The State shall devise land policies which recognize ultimate ownership of land by the people  .  .  .  The management and development of Zambia’s natural resources shall not bestow private ownership of any natural resource or authorize its use in perpetuity.

Under Papua New Guinea’s Land Act, the great bulk of the country’s land (currently 97  percent) is specified as “customary land.” It is “owned by the Indigenous People of Papua New Guinea whose ownership rights and interest is regulated by their customs.”42 Each country’s people has original rights to their natural resources, and as they exercise their rights freely to dispose of those resources for their own ends, quite varied property ownership arrangements will result.

2.7 O PETRÓLEO É NOSSO

Jacques Maritain, one of the framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, said that many different kinds of music can be played on the document’s strings.43 This is certainly true of the principle of popular resource sovereignty in Article 1 of the two human rights covenants. A total of 169 UN member-​ states, with very different political economies, are parties to at least one of these treaties, including the United States, Brazil, India, and South Korea. All these countries’ constitutions are compatible with popular resource sovereignty. The principle is compatible with laws allowing the private development of natural resources (as in the United States and Canada), laws establishing national resource companies (as in Norway and Venezuela), or mixed systems (as in Indonesia).44 The United States and Canada are unusual in having laws that allow minerals to become privately owned.45 Indeed, US federal law allows the 41. Constitution of Zambia, Arts. 10v, 339f. 42. UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous People,” January 31, 2011, 2. 43. Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New (New York: Random House, 2001), 230. 44.  Jenik Radon, “The ABC’s of Petroleum Contracts:  License-​ Concessions Agreements, Joint Ventures and Production-​Sharing Agreements,” in Svetlana Tsalik and Anya Schiffrin, eds., Covering Oil (New York: Open Society, 2005), 61–​62. See generally Elizabeth Bastida, Thomas Waelde, and Janneth Warden, eds., International and Comparative Mineral Law and Policy (The Hague: Kluwer, 2005). 45. In Canada, only minerals under land purchased before the early twentieth century (depending on jurisdiction) can be privately owned; the remainder (now covering 90 percent of Canada’s land) are owned by Canadian governments (www.nrcan. gc.ca/​minerals-​metals/​policy/​legislation-​regulations/​3707). The US government only

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individual states to experiment with different systems of private mineral ownership. Texas developed its own special state laws for private ownership of oil. In Texas, the landowner owns the oil beneath his or her land, but any adjacent landowner who drains that oil out gains title to it.46 George W. Bush’s family made much of its fortune under those Texas laws, and President Bush had nothing to fear when affirming the principle of popular resource sovereignty that validated those laws. It is therefore wrong to say, as one of Vladimir Putin’s former economic advisors once did in response to the Clean Trade proposals, that the principle of popular resource sovereignty “really means that resources must be nationalized, government-​ owned, and government-​ managed.”47 Concerns about nationalization, government ownership, excessive statism, and “resource nationalism” are real and important, but they are downstream from the basic political principle that we are vetting. To affirm popular resource sovereignty is not to affirm resource nationalism. More important, to affirm popular sovereignty is not to affirm absolute sovereign rights. To be sovereign is to have ultimate jurisdictional rights and original ownership rights, not necessarily to have unlimited such rights. And in the modern international system, none of the people’s rights could be unlimited. We see this in the human rights treaties themselves: the group rights of popular sovereignty in Article 1 are limited by the human rights of individuals in the articles that follow. Peoples must respect human rights as they authorize laws. Indeed, the people’s sovereign rights over their resources may be limited in many ways. For example, morally, and sometimes legally, a people has a duty not to dispose of their natural resources in ways that cause harm to other peoples—​through pollution, say, or through excessive greenhouse gas emissions.48 International environmental regulation, or an international fund to has rights in minerals offshore and on federal public lands, such as national parks. Still, the US government directly owns nearly 30 percent of the entire territory of the United States—​including more than 40 percent in states like California and Arizona and nearly 85 percent in Nevada. 46. See http://​www.fhoa.ca/​about-​freehold-​mineral-​rights.html. Many national systems leave discretion to regional and local laws. In Brazil, for example, regional environmental standards can be more, but not less, strict than national standards. 47. Andrei Illarionov, “To Punish the Guilty,” Cato Unbound, May 21, 2008, https://​ www.cato-​unbound.org/​2008/​05/​21/​andrei-​illarionov/​punish-​guilty; responding to Leif Wenar, “Living Up to Our Principles,” Cato Unbound, May 21, 2008, https://​www. cato-​unbound.org/​2008/​05/​23/​leif-​wenar/​living-​our-​principles. 48.  As the Stockholm Declaration says, states have “the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental policies, and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of their national jurisdiction.” Stockholm Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, UN Conference on the Human Environment (June 16, 1972) UN Doc A/​ CONF.48/​14/​Rev 1, 3, Art. 21. [ 40 ] Leif Wenar

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pay for climate change mitigation, would be compatible with popular resource sovereignty. Moreover, it is plausible that the future is being plundered by the present—​that the current generation of people in many countries is wrongly using up assets that should be saved for future generations.49 Indeed, even highly progressive proposals for “global justice” often involve nothing more than qualifications on popular resource sovereignty. For example, Thomas Pogge’s proposal for a Global Resource Dividend assumes that nations have full discretion over when and how to exploit their resources, but requires nations to pay into a fund for the world’s poor whenever resources are extracted.50 Whether this and similar proposals are feasible and desirable are further questions; as a matter of principle, they are compatible with peoples’ sovereign rights over their resources. We have found that the axioms of popular resource sovereignty are ownership and authorization:  the people originally own the resources, and the people authorize laws regarding them. As we have seen, a people may use their sovereign powers to authorize a wide range of resource laws regarding ownership. And the people’s sovereignty over resources continues, regardless of who now owns them. If the people first authorize a law allowing privatization of resources, they may later (as in the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution) authorize a law calling the resources back for “public use.”51 If citizens authorize a law entrusting resource management to the regime, they may later change those arrangements or countermand the regime’s decisions. The only conceptual limit to the people’s sovereign power is what we might call “Rousseau’s Thesis.” The people cannot permanently cede all lawmaking rights to the regime without negating popular sovereignty itself. “If, then, the people promises simply to obey, by that very act it dissolves itself, it loses its quality of being a people; the moment a master exists, there is no more sovereign, and the body politic is destroyed forthwith.”52

2.8 THE FIDUCIARY REGIME

Our focal principle is popular resource sovereignty. Where the citizens are sovereign, they have original property rights in their country’s resources and ultimate jurisdictional rights to authorize laws regarding those resources. We 49. See Paul Collier, Plundered Planet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 114. 50. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), 202–​21. 51.  US Constitution, Amendment V.  The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment requires that private property may be taken for public use only upon payment of “just compensation.” 52.  Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57.

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now turn to the relationships between the people and a regime that allow the people to exercise those rights: that allow citizens “for their own ends, freely to dispose of their natural wealth and resources.” Elementary legal concepts will be all we need to describe these relations. When sovereign, the people authorize the laws—​they do not write them (your authorized biography will not be the one you write, but the one whose author and text you approve). The legal relation envisioned since ancient times is that the citizens are the principal and the state is its agent. As Thomas Jefferson wrote:53 I consider the people who constitute a society or nation as the source of all authority in that nation; as free to transact their common concerns by any agents they think proper; to change these agents individually, or the organization of them in form or function whenever they please; [and] that all the acts done by these agents under the authority of the nation are the acts of the nation.

A sovereign people may relate to its authorized agent within different legal forms. Today’s national constitutions typically choose one of two forms for natural resources. The first is a principal-​director relationship, in which the principal retains full ownership of the resources and the agent undertakes to manage them. This is the arrangement envisioned, for example, in the Sudanese constitution, where it says that natural resources remain public prop­erty, and the state should prepare plans to exploit them.54 This form is familiar from joint stock companies, where the shareholders own the assets and the board of directors takes charge of administering those assets. A second agency relation is described in the Ghanaian constitution, which says that all minerals in the territory “shall be vested in the President on behalf of, and in trust for the people of Ghana.”55 This is a trust model: In common law jurisdictions, we say that the regime is given legal title to the resources as trustee, while the people have equitable ownership.56 Whatever its legal form, the people’s relation to the regime demands little of citizens. Citizens need not be involved in, or even aware of, the management of the country’s natural resources. Like shareholders of a corporation, or 53. Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 3, eds. Andrew Lipscomb and Albert Bergh, eds. (Washington, DC: Jefferson Memorial Association, 1906), 227. For a survey of the history of the trusteeship tradition of sovereign power from the conciliarists forward, and of private law concepts in the structuring of that history, see Jedediah Purdy and Kimberly Fielding, “Sovereigns, Trustees, Guardians: Private-​Law Concepts and the Limits of Legitimate State Power,” Law and Contemporary Problems 70 (2007), 165–​211. 54. Constitution of the Republic of Sudan (1998), Article 9. 55. Constitution of the Republic of Ghana (1992), Article 257 (6). 56. That is, the people, not the trustee, are regarded as having the beneficial rights in the trust property, and thus are the beneficiary of the trust. [ 42 ] Leif Wenar

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the beneficiaries of a trust, most citizens will not be interested in tracking the administration of their assets. Popular resource sovereignty only requires that citizens be able to find out what those in power are doing with the country’s resources, and that citizens be able to influence these decisions collectively if they so choose. To take the analogy further, there is nothing unusual about shareholders who do not know about or try to influence how a company’s assets are managed. There would be something seriously wrong, however, if shareholders could not find out about mismanagement of the company, or if there were no means by which shareholders could affect what the company will do. While the people’s attention to the regime’s resource management may be slack, a regime’s obligations to the people are tight. In all legal forms, the regime is a fiduciary of the people, and the legal rules here are stern: a fiduciary’s guiding duty is to manage the principal’s affairs for the principal’s benefit, not for any benefit to the fiduciary.57 The main rule is that a fiduciary must not profit from its position without the principal’s approval. This rule includes all profits from transactions made in the principal’s name, and also profits that come about because of opportunities that arise from the agent’s position (e.g., all opportunities for profit that a president gains because of being president). All these profits must go to the principal unless the principal approves another arrangement. The same is true of any bribes, kickbacks, or secret commissions. For all these rules, a fiduciary’s liabilities are strict. The fiduciary may offer neither the defense that he intended no breach of duty, nor the defense that his deals left the principal better off. So the duty of a president (fiduciary) entrusted with a country’s natural resources is to manage the people’s resources for the benefit of the people (principal)—​not for any benefit to the president. A president may not profit from being the manager of the people’s resources without the people’s approval, but must direct all revenues from resource transactions to the people. All payments gained by the president for managing the people’s resources must go to the people, as must all bribes, kickbacks, and secret commissions, unless the people approve otherwise. The president may collect a reasonable salary but may offer no defense for any other income arising from the management of natural resources except that the people approve its payment. Lawyers and judges naturally assume that state officials are fiduciaries of the people in just this sense. For instance, Justice Peter Smith of the British High Court of Justice, when ruling that the president of Zambia and his subordinates defrauded the country of $58 million, said that these Zambian officials

57. See American Law Institute, Restatement of the Law of Agency (Third) (2006), §2.03.

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[o]‌wed fiduciary duties to act in good faith, to act in accordance with the powers and authority vested in them, not to place them in a position of conflict, not to make any secret profit or receive any secret payment and have a duty to account. . . . They are familiar duties and none of the Defendants disputed such duties. [The President] clearly owed those duties when he carried out the functions that are vested in him by virtue of . . . the Constitution.

Justice Smith, noting that over a decade, the president had spent ten times his official income at a single designer clothing shop in Switzerland, announced, “The people of Zambia will know that whenever [the President] appears in public wearing a smart handmade suit or a pair of his ‘signature’ shoes that they were acquired by stealing money from the people.”58 Throughout all of this law, the people’s authorization is the key. In a fiduciary relationship, the baseline is that the principal (here, the people) receives all of the money. A fiduciary (the regime) may legally profit from managing the principal’s assets—​so long as the principal (the people) authorizes this. A fiduciary can collect a reasonable fee, the reasonableness of the fee being decided by the legal authority of that jurisdiction—​again, ultimately, the people. Indeed, the people must authorize the regime’s management of its resources, whatever form that management takes. A regime’s resource management can take a shareholder model or a trust model, and any of the many variations of these models—​so long as the people authorize it. Or the regime may privatize certain resources, taking them out of public ownership—​so long as the people authorize it. Rousseau famously asked the sovereign people to answer a double-​layered question when authorizing its regime, which we can adapt for resources:59 Does it please the Sovereign to preserve the present form of resource management? Does it please the Sovereign for the regime to manage resources as it is doing? The people can only answer those questions—​can only authorize the regime’s decisions—​when citizens are in conditions that make authorization possible. Those conditions are our next study, and again sturdy concepts are close at hand.

58. Zambia v Meer Care and Desai (a Firm) and Others [2007] EWHC 952 (Ch) (May 4, 2007), 95, 62, 467 (italics and bold in original suppressed). 59. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, 120. [ 44 ] Leif Wenar

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2.9 CONDITIONS FOR AUTHORIZATION

Call all of a regime’s decisions regarding the country’s resources its “management” of those resources. Management includes passing laws regarding resources. So when President Charles Taylor’s regime in Liberia passed the Strategic Commodities Act of 2000, which ascribed to Taylor the sole right to sell any of the country’s natural resources, that was an act of management. Management also includes decisions to sell resources under current laws. So the decision of the US government in 2013 to auction off exploration leases for oil acreage offshore of Texas was an act of management. Intuitively, Taylor’s Strategic Commodities Act could not have been authorized by the then-​oppressed and strife-​torn Liberian people; for the US auction, popular authorization seems at least possible. What must be true for a regime rightly to claim the people’s authorization while it manages a country’s resources? For X to authorize, X must have the capacity to authorize. The theory of capacity is well understood for individuals, having been developed for consequential issues such as consent to medical procedures. So, for instance, under the UK Medical Capacity Act of 2005, an individual is taken to have the capacity to make a decision affecting his or her own health when he or she:60 . Can understand and retain information relevant to the decision; 1 2. Can use that information in a process of deliberation leading to a decision; 3. Can communicate his or her decision. In interpreting the first, informational condition, courts have required that a person must be able to understand “in broad terms the nature of the procedure which is intended.”61 The second, deliberation condition demands that the person be able to weigh this information in a rational process leading to a decision.62 The third, communication condition requires that the person be able to convey his or her decision in some efficacious form to the relevant authority. If these three conditions obtain, then the law considers that person capable to authorize. Contract law sets out a further condition for a capable individual’s agreement to be valid, and so authorize. Valid consent cannot be given with a pistol to the bridge of the nose or, as British law has it, where the consenter is under duress or undue influence of a coercive power.63 Such conditions for capacity 60. UK Mental Capacity Act of 2005, §3(1); see Jonathan Herring, Medical Law and Ethics, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 149ff. 61. Herring, Medical Law and Ethics, 159–​61, 166–​67. The person must be capable of understanding the procedure in broad terms, when the treatment is not misrepresented and there is no deliberate withholding of information. 62. Herring, Medical Law and Ethics, 157, 163. 63.  See Ewan McKendrick, Contract Law (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012), 625–​82.

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and validity, once transposed from individuals to peoples, set natural bounds on the conditions for peoples to be able to authorize a regime’s management of their resources. What form of authorization are we looking for, then? In pleading that it has the people’s authorization, a regime may claim that the people asked the regime to pass certain laws and then to sell off the resources within those laws. Or a regime may claim that the people explicitly agreed that the regime should do these things. The claim that a regime most likely to make is that the people signaled their acquiescence to its management of the country’s resources by remaining silent as the regime made its decisions. Any regime’s most likely appeal is to the people’s tacit approval: that the people could have objected but didn’t. This can be a plausible appeal since many citizens may not be interested in tracking the administration of the country’s natural assets, but may only have very general ideas about what the regime is doing with the country’s resources. (Polling of Ghanaians after the discovery of offshore oil, for instance, suggested that they overwhelmingly supported the general idea of creating a fund to save some of the country’s oil money for future generations.)64 Tacit approval is actual approval:  under the right conditions, silence can be just as much a signal of approval as shouting “aye.”65 To take an example from personal finance: your financial manager trades stocks for you, perhaps dozens of times a year, with your tacit approval. You chose him as your agent, and you could change his investment strategy for your portfolio from conserv­ ative to aggressive if you liked. You are in the right conditions to change his strategy, but you do not. So your financial manager rightly claims your tacit approval for the trades that he makes in your name. The financial manager example shows that tacit approval is real approval. It would of course be unrealistic to expect this kind of personal relationship in politics, between citizens and regimes. What then? We need an account of public authorization that describes uncontroversially the circumstances where citizens could not possibly be approving a regime’s resource management—​ even tacitly. Combining the basic points so far yields four political conditions for popular authorization of resource management that should be certain. These are the minimal conditions for authorization, formulated simply so as to maximize their clarity:

64.  Joe Amoako-​Tuffour, How Ghana Plans to Manage Its Petroleum Revenues (Accra: Institute of International Affairs, 2010), 16. 65. This follows A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 80.

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1. Information. Citizens who cannot find out about the management of their resources cannot approve that management, even tacitly. At the very least, the average citizen should be able to obtain reliable general information about who is getting the revenues from resource sales and how these are being spent. Citizens need not have the details of all commercial arrangements (any more than, say, shareholders do). But there must be some systems in place that will reliably alert citizens to what they would regard as gross mismanagement of their assets. 2. Independence. To be authorizing, approval must not be forced by the person seeking authorization. Citizens who are brainwashed, relentlessly propagandized by the regime, or subject to extraordinary psychological manipulation do not validate the management of their resources, even if they remain silent as the country’s resources are sold. North Korea has some oil, but the comprehensively dominated people of North Korea could not now give tacit approval to the current regime selling their oil abroad, even if the regime were inclined to do this. 3. Deliberation. In order for the citizenry to be able to approve of the regime’s resource management, citizens must be able to discuss that management with each other. Ordinary citizens must be able to pass information to each other about resource laws and policies, without a reasonable fear of suffering major harms like serious injury, loss of employment, imprisonment, torture, disappearance, or death. And citizens must be able to debate the regime’s resource policies with each other, in public or in private, without reasonable fear of such harms. 4. Dissent. In order to approve to the regime’s resource management, citizens must be able to dissent from that management without risking severe costs. Any regime claiming that it has the authority of the people for its resource management must allow open disagreement about any part of that management. Citizens must be able peacefully to express their dissent, alone or together, inside or outside these formal mechanisms, and without justified fear of major harms. And the people’s dissent must work: if a majority of citizens strongly oppose the regime’s resource management, that management must, within a reasonable time, change to reflect the people’s opposition. In concrete political terms, these conditions require that citizens have at least bare-​bones civil liberties and basic political rights. For civil liberties, there must be some press freedom for citizens to have access to information about the regime’s resource decisions and about possible gross mismanagement. The state must not be so deeply opaque that it is nearly impossible for citizens to find out who is getting the revenues from resource sales and how these revenues are being spent. All citizens (including women, and members

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of religious and ethnic groups that are not in power) must be able to discuss the regime’s resource management with each other without fear of serious injury, loss of employment, imprisonment, torture, disappearance, or death. There must be sufficient rule of law that citizens who wish to protest resource decisions publicly and peacefully may do so without fear of arrest, dismissal, or worse. Citizens must also have basic political rights, in order to ensure that the regime’s management of resources will change to reflect the majority’s views within a reasonable time. A  deep exploration of the meaning of democracy would not be useful here. For politics, we need signs visible to the senses. The people cannot possibly control their resources under a highly authoritarian regime:  under a military junta or a personalistic dictatorship, an autocratic theocracy or a single-​party state. Nor can a people control their resources if the state is so failed that it lacks control over large parts of the populated territory. If these minimal conditions do not obtain in a country, then the silence of citizens while their resources are exported cannot signal authorization. Absent minimal civil liberties and political rights, the people’s silence is just silence. Either citizens cannot find out about resource sales, or they are too scared or oppressed to discuss and protest them. Where citizens cannot learn what is happening with their resources, where they cannot debate what the regime is doing, or where they cannot conceivably say no to their resources being sold off, they cannot possibly be authorizing those sales. Popular resource sovereignty says that the natural resources of a country belong to the people of that country. The rights of a people are violated whenever someone gains control of this property through deception, force, or extreme manipulation. The oppressed citizens of Equatorial Guinea, for example, could not possibly have been authorizing their strongman president, Teodoro Obiang, to sell off their oil. These citizens could not find out what sales Obiang was making or where the money was going, and they have been either unable to protest his sales or are too fearful to try. In no case can the citizens of Equatorial Guinea be said to have acquiesced to Obiang’s deals. Obiang has taken control of the oil because he can, without authorization from the people. The capacity to threaten a people should not confer the right to sell off their resources, nor should the capacity to deceive or overbear. Obiang could not rightly sell the country’s oil, so the corporations that sign contracts with him could not have gained title to what they have steamed away in the holds of their ships. If we believe in popular resource sovereignty, these international resource corporations have been carrying away stolen goods.

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2.10 BENEFICENT DESPOTISM

“Look into the Absolute Monarchies of the World,” says John Locke, “and see what becomes of the Conveniences of Life, and the Multitudes of People.”66 Locke was right about Equatorial Guinea, yet he was wrong about Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is different in a way that is apparent to all observers, and the opponents of popular resource sovereignty might use this difference to sow further doubts. The average Equatorial Guinean is materially badly off, these opponents might say, while the average Saudi is not. Saudis receive many more benefits from the country’s oil wealth than their Equatoguinean counterparts, both in public and private goods. Infant mortality is fairly low in Saudi Arabia, life expectancy is a respectable 74 years, and literacy is slightly above the world average.67 A crude way to measure how well a regime is transforming “national income” into “human development” is to compare the country’s world ranking in national income per capita to the country’s world ranking in the Human Development Index. Saudi Arabia’s income is only 26 ranks higher than its human development rating, while Equatorial Guinea’s is 79 ranks higher.68 Saudis cannot now actually give approval to the deal they are getting for their oil. Despite the recent modernization initiatives of Mohammad bin Salman, the Saudi regime is one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world. Yet, it might be said that Saudi citizens would, just perhaps, approve if they could. This kind of thought may be lingering as we ponder the Saudi regime’s resource sales. The thought is not that Saudi citizens are approving, if only tacitly; the thought is that Saudi citizens would rationally approve because they are getting a good enough deal from the regime’s management of their oil. Hypothetically, if Saudis were adequately informed, if they could discuss the matter freely together and then express their views, then most would endorse the status quo. In a philosopher’s parlance, we are considering authorization not by tacit but by hypothetical popular approval. In speculating about hypothetical approval, we might tell different stories about what benefits the average Saudi would want from the oil. One story is that Saudis are devout; the average Saudi gets all that a good Muslim should want, and he or she does not begrudge the royals—​who lead the Arab and the Sunni worlds and protect the holy sites—​their palaces. Indeed, the average Saudi enjoys royal celebrity, much as the average Canadian or Spaniard does. 66. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 170. 67.  CIA World Factbook, “Saudi Arabia,” www.cia.gov/​library/​publications/​the-​ world-​factbook/​geos/​sa.html. 68.  UN Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 2016 (New York: UNDP, 2016), Table 1.

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Or, alternatively, we could tell this story:  the average Saudi doesn’t like the royals so much, living their lavish, jet-​set, and debauched lifestyles while imposing sharia law on the people. Nor is the average Saudi pleased that Mohammad bin Salman, while imposing austerity cuts on the people, one day impulsively spent more than half a billion dollars of the country’s oil revenues to buy a superyacht for himself.69 (With that amount, he could have bought 2,700 Lamborghinis for himself instead.) Such speculations are useless for grounding responsible policy toward Saudi Arabia; they reveal more about the speculator than about the Saudis. We might try instead to rigorize our thoughts about hypothetical approval with more scientific comparisons across resource-​exporting countries, to see in which countries the citizens are getting more benefits from their resources. For example, we might look at the country-​scoring system developed by Hamilton and Clemens, which measures resource depletion against environmental quality and investment in human capital.70 Or we could deploy the “sustainable development” measures of Arrow et al. to evaluate how well different regimes have used natural capital to build up human and manufactured capital in ways that can sustain standards of living intergenerationally.71 The Saudi regime has in recent years gained a reputation for more prudent resource management, so it would not be surprising if the kingdom came out well in such comparisons to other authoritarian countries. We should, however, resist making the question of “enough benefits” a technical one. First, it is extremely difficult for outsiders to know whether citizens are happy with the deal that they are getting from their regime in culturally distant countries. Statistics about economic performance are not helpful. Before the revolution against President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) called his economic model a miracle.72 Egypt’s economy grew at 2.6  percent in the decade before the 2011 revolution, and Tunisia’s grew at 3.4  percent—​these are higher rates of growth than in Europe or the United States.73 A  month after the Syrian

69.  Mark Mazzetti and Ben Hubbard, “Rise of Saudi Prince Shatters Decades of Tradition,” New  York Times, October 15, 2016, https://​www.nytimes.com/​2016/​10/​ 16/​world/​rise-​of-​saudi-​prince-​shatters-​decades-​of-​royal-​tradition.html. 70.  Kirk Hamilton and Michael Clemens, “Genuine Savings Rates in Developing Countries,” World Bank Economic Review 13 (1999), 333–​ 56; and see also data. worldbank.org/​indicator/​NY.ADJ.SVNG.GN.ZS/​. 71. Kenneth Arrow, Partha Dasgupta, Lawrence Goulder, Gretchen Daily, Paul Ehrlich, Geoffrey Heal, et al., “Are We Consuming Too Much?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18 (2004), 147–​72; Kenneth Arrow, Partha Dasgupta, Lawrence H. Goulder, Kevin J. Mumford, and Kirsten Oleson, “Sustainability and the Measurement of Wealth,” Environment and Development Economics 17 (2012), 317–​53. 72. Al-​Jazeera, “Tunisian Revolution Yet to Solve Inequality,” April 11, 2011. 73.  Branko Milanovic, “Inequality and Its Discontents,” Foreign Affairs, August 12, 2011. [ 50 ] Leif Wenar

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uprising started, the IMF forecast 3.1 percent growth for the current year, and 5.1 percent for the year to come.74 “Revolution often comes unexpectedly,” as Michael Walzer once said, “a sudden upsurge of previously invisible political currents.”75 We would need to see those currents to form a judgment about hypothetical popular approval, but we cannot. Nor should we be hypothesizing authorization at all. Tacit approval is real approval; hypothetical approval is not. As Dworkin says, “[a]‌hypothetical contract is not simply a pale form of an actual contract, . . . it is no contract at all.”76 The only approval that can authorize a regime’s actions is actual—​the actual approval of the citizenry. For outsiders to think otherwise and make a technical exercise out of the level of benefits that they believe the people should consent to, would be a kind of cognitive colonialism. Popular resource sovereignty is about the control that peoples should exercise. Peoples “may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources,” they have an “inherent right . . . to enjoy and utilize fully and freely their natural wealth and resources.” Foreigners respect a people not by computing what citizens should want, but by respecting the decisions they make. The only way for outsiders to judge popular resource sovereignty by a “benefit” standard would be if the citizens themselves had actually endorsed a ranked list of benefits—​jobs, welfare provisions, an undamaged environment, political stability, etc.—​that they wanted as priorities for spending the resource money. And this the people cannot do, either in Saudi Arabia or Equatorial Guinea. We have now cornered a final thought, a final sentiment about sovereignty in Saudi Arabia. This thought may bubble up from our memories of childhood stories—​stories we inherited from the many centuries when our own ancestors could only muse on whether they had been given a good or bad king, one blessed or hard. When expressed, this thought is that Obiang is a brutal despot while the Saudi king is benevolent—​ or, to be more agnostic about his motives, at least beneficent.77

74.  Nada Bakri, “Sanctions Pose Growing Threat to Syria’s Assad,” The New  York Times, October 11, 2011, https://​www.nytimes.com/​2011/​10/​11/​world/​middleeast/​ sanctions-​pose-​growing-​threat-​to-​syrias-​president-​assad.html. 75.  Michael Walzer, “The Moral Standing of States:  A Response to Four Critics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (1980), 209–​29 at 222. 76. Ronald Dworkin, “The Original Position,” in Norman Daniels, ed., Reading Rawls (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 17. 77. When the Saudi regime announced tens of billions of extra spending on housing, salaries, unemployment, and other benefits during the Arab Spring, a White House official described this spending as “safety valves the Saudis open when pressure builds”; another official called the money “stimulus funds motivated by self-​preservation.” The David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, “U.S.-​Saudi Tensions Intensify with Mideast Turmoil,” New York Times, March 14, 2011.

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A  good king confers benefits on his people; a bad king cruelly deprives them.78 If we have this thought, it can serve as a touchstone for our convictions about popular resource sovereignty. If we believe in popular resource sovereignty, there can be no such thing as a ruler who is beneficent with resource revenues. No one can be generous by giving someone what they already own. The citizens of a country are entitled to all the value of their resources, while the regime is entitled to not a penny. All of Saudi Arabia’s oil belongs to the Saudi people, and the royals can only have their superyachts and palaces—​ indeed, anything bought with oil money—​at the people’s sufferance. A king’s right is not to all, it is to nothing. And the same holds for all dictators, supreme leaders, and big-​man presidents.79 The reason that hypothetical approval seemed attractive is not because it is a plausible account of political authorization, but because it expresses a posture of respectful international relations. Outsiders do have real difficulties understanding the political dynamics of distant countries, and can do great damage when they take it on themselves to judge what a people “really” wants. The respectful posture is to assume that peoples who are in conditions tacitly to authorize their governments’ resource management should be regarded as in fact doing so. This presumption, as Walzer puts it, “is simply the respect that foreigners owe to a historic community and to its internal life.”80 The respectful and practical posture is to assume that a people is authorizing its regime whenever it can do so: that the necessary conditions for the people’s tacit approval are also sufficient.81 The tragedy in our world is that there are 78. It should be noted that under any interpretation, the Saudi regime has often not been particularly beneficent to the Shi’a minority that is between 10 and 15 percent of the kingdom’s citizenry, nor has it been magnanimous to the expat workers who constitute more than a quarter of the country’s population. 79. “It is sometimes suggested that the citizens of the oil monarchies feel gratitude to their rulers for giving them the money, and that this gratitude translates into political support. Yet gratitude results from the receipt of a gift. The Gulf Arabs, however, think that they themselves, as citizens, own the oil, not the ruling families. . . . Few are particularly grateful on receipt of something they think is theirs in the first place.” Michael Herb, All in the Family (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 241 (italics in original). 80. Walzer, “The Moral Standing of States,” 221, 222. According to the account developed here, Walzer goes too far in his permissive assumption about the union of a people, and even a tyrannical government. Yet the epistemological concerns that Walzer discusses are genuine, and are sufficient to turn a theory of possible tacit approval into a political presumption of actual tacit approval. 81.  Moreover, there are also real practical difficulties in going beyond presumed tacit approval and drawing a bright line around what might count as a people’s explicit approval. Consider a spectrum of institutions that provide citizens increasing control over the resources of their country. On one end of the spectrum are the four conditions for tacit assent set out previously. On the other end, citizens approve every decision made regarding the country’s resources (every contract, every privatization, etc.) through a referendum. Between these two points are all the existing and possible institutions of representative governance. Those who want to judge a country’s [ 52 ] Leif Wenar

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so many states where such approval is impossible—​where the people cannot authorize the sale of their own assets.

2.11 LINE-​D RAWING

So far, we see only joyless conclusions from our theory. There is no pleasure in the fact that the Saudi people lack control over their natural resources. Theory has no enemies, and the Saudi regime is now at least better than it was. In recent years, the Saudi regime has done more to secure political rights and civil liberties, to open the educational system, to roll back some of the most oppressive laws concerning women, and to diversify the economy. Friends of popular resource sovereignty can only wish these efforts success. Still, the country is a considerable distance from satisfying the minimal conditions for popular authorization, and experience advises caution in thinking that the regime can cure itself of the worst symptoms of its long addiction to oil revenues. Looking further afield gives some grounds for hope. Indonesia, formerly authoritarian and the world’s largest Muslim country, beat its addiction to oil and is now well along its democratic transition. Islam itself is obviously compatible with popular resource sovereignty.82 In Nigeria, which is still very troubled but improving, widespread public protests and a general strike in 2012 forced the government to reverse course on oil subsidies; Nigeria in 2012 satisfied the minimal conditions for popular authorization, at least regarding those subsidies. The Arab country farthest down the road of reform, Morocco, does nearly satisfy the minimal conditions for popular resource sovereignty.83 Yet—​less hopeful—​the one topic about which Moroccans are least free to discuss and dissent (besides the dignity of the king) is a topic tightly connected to the country’s primary resource export.84 resource sales by whether the people have “explicitly authorized the sale” will need to draw a bright line somewhere on this spectrum, and it must be a line that is visible and rugged enough for use in international politics. This is one reply to Pogge’s remarks in “Responses to the Critics,” Thomas Pogge and His Critics, Alison M. Jaggar, ed. (London: Polity Press, 2010), 224–​30. 82.  Muslim-​majority democracies include large countries, such as Bangladesh and Turkey, and small countries, such as Senegal and Mali. Perhaps even Wahhabism is not incompatible with popular resource sovereignty: the Qatari regime is Wahhabi, but is closer to constitutional monarchy than Saudi Arabia, and it even went out of its way to create the Al-​Jazeera media network. Qatar is today, however, far from meeting the four conditions given here. 83. Comoros is a member of the Arab League, and Comorans have more control over their resources than Moroccans do over theirs. But Comoros, as a small set of islands with a more diverse population, is a less interesting comparison for our purposes here. 84. Moroccans are below the minimal conditions for authorizing their regime’s management of resources in Western Sahara. An average citizen protesting the regime’s control over Western Sahara’s phosphates (a large part of the country’s export revenues)

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And sadly, overall, the global situation is dire. Looking around the world for oil, we see big Middle Eastern producers like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, as well as major producers elsewhere, like Russia, Kazakhstan, Algeria, and Angola. That is already half of the world’s proven oil reserves, and none of these countries meets the minimal conditions for popular resource sovereignty.85 Mankind’s primary energy supply is primarily controlled by a roomful of men. These few men are—​financially, militarily, geostrategically—​extremely well entrenched. They have used their oil money to inculcate authoritarian ideologies in their populations (and sometimes, like Saudi Arabia, to spread them vigorously abroad). The peoples of these countries, often overborne and ideologized for generations, are usually in bad shape for taking control over the country’s resources. Popular resource sovereignty is the ideal, but not the reality, of today’s state system.

2.12 EASING GRIDLOCK

What kinds of reforms, then, are most promising? The international system is slowly developing coordinative mechanisms to address some of the massive challenges of the future such as climate change and global financial regulation. International bodies are becoming incrementally more inclusive, as seen in the move from the G8 to the G20. Transgovernmental networks on issues from the environment to antitrust are becoming more robust. Above them are metanetworks, such as the Financial Stability Board; below them are private bodies of technocrats such as the International Accounting Standards Board. There are also public-​private hybrids such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and legions of civil society organizations that hold states accountable for (and sometimes provide services in lieu of) governance.86 International systems for regulating corporations by human rights norms are slowly phasing in.87 Such mechanisms are not yet adequate to global problems, especially on issues such as climate change.88 Yet compared with twenty years ago, there has been some progress. would rationally fear serious consequences from the regime. The regime’s restrictions on citizens’ deliberation and dissent on Western Sahara are tightly focused; without them, Morocco could meet the minimal conditions for popular resource sovereignty. 85. Oil reserve figures from BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2017, 12. 86. Thomas Hale, David Held, and Kevin Young, Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013). 87. John Ruggie, “Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ Framework,” Human Rights Council 17/​31 (March 21, 2011). 88. Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. chs. 1 and 2. [ 54 ] Leif Wenar

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To make more progress, more transnational coordinative capacity is needed. A constant theme of recent international negotiations has been how limited collective decision-​making is at the global level. Local interests are opposed, trust is limited, and mutual understanding is weak. Many of the coordinative institutions we have, such as the UN Security Council, are locked into their current form by powerful states, even though they are now seriously misaligned with the overall distribution of global power. The rise of the large non-​Western states, made possible by their welcome trajectory of escape from extreme poverty, will make meshing perspectives even more difficult.89 Somehow, the species must reform its basic institutional structure to increase its problem-​solving abilities. Whatever coordinative institutions we favor, the resource curse will make them more difficult to build. The resource curse adds significant gridlock and unpredictability to the global system by forcing intractable issues onto an already-​overcrowded agenda. Resource-​fueled authoritarians destabilize democracies and fund terrorism abroad (Russia, Iran). Their divide-​and-​rule mix of coercion and clientelism often leaves their populations fractious and mistrustful; when the regime is suddenly overthrown, it is often replaced by civic strife that spills over borders and generates waves of refugees (Libya, Syria). In fragile and failed states, resource revenues add fuel to the fires of conflicts that can spread and leave burnt-​out areas where bad actors can congregate (Iraq, Democratic Republic of Congo). Resource price-​volatility born of political instability can help to trigger global economic crises. Of course, any of these problems can be the effects of other causes. The problem with global resource trade is that it is a potent causal force pushing toward such bad effects. The global challenges that we face are ramified by the flaws in global resource trade; removing those flaws can reduce the divisive issues that require collective action. To return to institutional cosmopolitans, they can agree that whoever should have control over the world’s natural resources, it should not be the dictators and absolute monarchs, the supreme leaders, or the militias. Putting control in the hands of such men contributes directly to domestic misery, and normatively, these actors cannot be redeemed. There is no reason to believe the plundering slogans of the resource-​fueled militias, and still less the medieval apologetics of kings for their control over resource wealth. Yet why move from where we are now to popular resource sovereignty? There is some tendency among advanced thinkers to suggest that popular sovereignty is a topic that has run its course. We understand what that is about; it is no longer interesting. This is part of the great forgetting of how recent the victories of popular sovereignty have been, and how aspirational this step

89. National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2030 (2012), 15–​19, 48–​55.

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away from Westphalia still remains for many. One can read both the pain of the battle and the yearning for popular sovereignty in the Namibian constitution of 1990:90 We the people of Namibia -​have finally emerged victorious in our struggle against colonialism, racism, and apartheid; are determined to adopt a Constitution which expresses for ourselves and our children our resolve to cherish and to protect the gains of our long struggle; desire to promote amongst all of us the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Namibian nation among and in association with the nations of the world; will strive to achieve national reconciliation and to foster peace, unity and a common loyalty to a single state; committed to these principles, have resolved to constitute the Republic of Namibia as a sovereign, secular, democratic and unitary State securing to all our citizens justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Also, in the South African Constitution of 1996:91 We, the people of South Africa, Recognise the injustices of our past; Honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land; Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity. We therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic so as to: Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights; Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law; Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and Build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations.

To these two nations, which have so recently overcome the worst manifestations of their Westphalian resource curse, we add the anguished bravado of a third nation which has not: Iraq. This is from the Iraqi constitution of 2005:92 We the people of Iraq who have just risen from our stumble, and who are looking with confidence to the future through a republican, federal, democratic, pluralistic system, have resolved with the determination of our men, women, the elderly and youth, to respect the rules of law, to establish justice and equality to cast aside the politics of aggression, and to tend to the concerns of women and 90. Constitution of the Republic of Namibia, Preamble. 91. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Preamble. 92. Constitution of the Republic of Iraq, Preamble. [ 56 ] Leif Wenar

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their rights, and to the elderly and their concerns, and to children and their affairs and to spread a culture of diversity and defusing terrorism.

In the big picture, the world’s transition to popular sovereignty is proceeding exceedingly well. In 1973, democratic countries were outnumbered by almost 3 to 1.  Today, democracies form the majority.93 The exceptions, as we know, are the resource-​cursed states. No highly oil-​dependent country has ever transitioned to democracy.94 Oil doubles the risk of civil conflict, and resources such as gems increase the severity and duration of such conflicts.95 The major oil-​exporting states outside the West are today no richer, no freer, and no more peaceful than they were even in 1980.96 The struggle of resource-​ cursed countries to overcome Westphalia continues. Popular sovereignty remains the ideal of most of the world. Clear majorities in most countries report being in favor of it.97 Nor is this just ideology; individuals can see what social science has confirmed—​that popular sovereignty protects individuals. Popular sovereignty better protects the most basic individual rights: the right not to be tortured, the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned, and the rights not to be murdered or disappeared by the state.98 Popular sovereignty is also insurance against large-​scale, politically dependent catastrophes like famine.99 Popular sovereignty really is the most certain way we know to secure individuals from severe abuse and neglect by those with political power. Encouraging popular sovereignty cannot be quick or costless. Yet another great advantage of reinforcing popular sovereignty is that successful self-​determining nations grow together. Popular sovereignty makes people more extraconnective, as well as more intraconnective. Becoming successfully self-​determining makes a people much less likely to go to war with another self-​determining people. It also makes a country more likely to create and participate in international institutions, and more likely to comply with 93. Here, extending Larry Diamond’s series to 2017, see The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (New York, Macmillan, 2008), 372. 94. Again extending Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy, 76. 95.  Michael Ross, The Oil Curse:  How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1; Philippe Le Billon, Wars of Plunder: Conflict, Profits, and the Politics of Resources (New York: Columbia University Press), 15–​16. 96. Ross, The Oil Curse, updated in personal communication, June 2016. 97. Russell Dalton, Doh Shin, and Willy Jou, “How People Understand Democracy,” in Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner, eds., How People View Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2008), 1–​15 at 1. 98. For a summary of the empirical data, see Thomas Christiano, “An Instrumental Argument for a Human Right to Democracy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 29 (2011): 142–​76. 99.  Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999), 16.

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international treaties. We have good reason to believe such theses: the data are already there.100 Those who hope for more cosmopolitan institutions should see strengthening popular sovereignty as the most responsible means to their ends.101 The principles of popular sovereignty may feel like old news to some in the rich world, but to many elsewhere, they are still aspirations. Remnants of the Westphalian version of the state system remain with us, and its unreformed vices—​especially those concerning trade in natural resources—​ should not be confused for failures of the system itself. Our forebears fought hard to entrench norms of popular sovereignty within the state system; there is still work for us to do to finish theirs. Strengthening peoples so that they gain more control over their natural resources will put individuals into better conditions to become connective, and so increase the global coordinative capacity. Strengthening peoples will allow them to grow together to seek their own unities in the future, given the particular crises and opportunities that they will see, much better than we now do.

100.  For a recent literature review on the “democratic peace,” see Hayes, “The Democratic Peace and the New Evolution of an Old Idea”; on international cooperation, see Beth Simmons, “Compliance with International Agreements,” Annual Review of Political Science 1 (1998), 75–​93. 101. For a rich account of popular sovereignty in the creation of cosmopolitan agency, see Lea Ypi, Global Justice and Avant-​Garde Political Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 6. [ 58 ] Leif Wenar

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CHAPTER 3

Reflections on Institutional Cosmopolitanism State Responsibility in a Globalized Age RICHARD BE ARDSWORTH

3.1 INTRODUCTION

In a recent discussion of the pertinence of cosmopolitanism to our age, Michael Blake takes issue with the concept, arguing that it has served its purpose because “we are all cosmopolitans now,” since everyone, bar racists, believes in the moral equality of all human beings.1 For Blake, the moral framework of cosmopolitan egalitarianism is no longer an issue of contention. What requires theoretical and empirical enquiry is, rather, “what treating people as moral equals would actually look like.”2 In his specific response to Blake in the same volume, Thomas Pogge rejoins that the concept should not be retired since the notion and practice of impartiality at the global level (a distinct understanding of cosmopolitan universality) remains far from won. He writes: It is clear enough that the global governance structures that have grown by leaps and bounds in the decades since the end of the Cold War—​infested as they are with national nepotism—​will not be able to solve the challenges facing 1. This discussion is set in the terms of Thomas Pogge’s seminal definition of moral cosmopolitanism in the early 1990s. See his “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics 103 (1992): 48–​75, especially 50. 2.  Michael Blake, “We Are All Cosmopolitans Now,” in Gillian Brock, ed., Cosmopolitanism Versus Non-​Cosmopolitanism: Critiques, Defenses, Reconceptualizations (Oxford University Press: 2013), 35–​54, at 52.

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human civilization. Foremost among these challenges are the threats posed by nationally controlled advanced weapons and other dangerous technologies, the threats of ecological catastrophe through climate change or resource depletion, and the threats posed by supranational lobbying which results in ineffectual and unstable global arrangements that might lead (as foreshadowed by the recent financial crisis) to massive economic collapse. If humanity is to master these existential challenges, we must learn to reject national nepotism and to expunge it from our supranational rule-​making and international agencies. Given the magnitude of the threat, it would be nice if we could get on with this learning before disaster strikes.3

With regard to “existential challenges” to the human species, Pogge argues, cosmopolitanism is not an empty concept because cosmopolitan egalitarianism must be supplemented by institutional structures to have effect in the first place. To wish to retire the concept of cosmopolitanism now because of its general moral self-​evidence evades, as a result, the institutional condition of effective moral equality. One might wish to question Blake’s starting perception that moral cosmopolitanism is self-​evident in the present era of globalization, but I do not engage on this path here. Rather, I want to pursue, more narrowly, the institutional cosmopolitan argument per se in order to seek revision of it from within its own terms. To do so, the introduction will first define how institutional cosmopolitanism is understood, underline its blind spot, and then summarize this chapter’s argument in response to it. Since Pogge originally formulated the concept in his groundbreaking article “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,”4 institutional cosmopolitanism has carried at least three concerns beyond the normative core of cosmopolitan egalitarianism. First, it forthrightly maintains that our individual responsibilities to nonnationals follow from, and are oriented toward helping fulfill, the basic rights that all human beings share.5 Second, institutional cosmopolitanism argues that, since the order of the world (basic global structures such as the organization of the global economic system) is arranged to render impossible the fulfillment of these rights, and since everyone is now involved in this interdependent order, the nonfulfillment of human rights is potentially everyone’s responsibility.6 Institutional cosmopolitanism does not, however, simply broaden the scope of our moral 3.  Thomas Pogge, “Concluding Reflections,” in Cosmopolitanism Versus Non-​ Cosmopolitanism, 294–​319, at 298. 4. Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty.” 5. See Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008). 6.  For an elaborate version of this argument, see Iris Marion Young, “A Social Connection Model” in her Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 95–​122. [ 60 ]  Richard Beardsworth

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duties due to our complicity in the social processes of the world. As remarked previously, it supplements its moral sister: for the institutional cosmopolitan, moral equivalence is simply not significant without institutional implementation. The focus on the institution of human rights and on organizational reform is accordingly primary. Third, and as a consequence, institutional cosmopolitanism targets how current global institutions structurally undo the fulfillment of basic human rights and calls for radical revision of international organizations (IOs) in order to satisfy the requirement of global impartiality. Following Pogge’s terms of argument, only once the forces of private and local (including national) interest are expunged from international institutions will something like a supranational cosmopolitan order be possible. In other words, only when national interest no longer informs the terms, commitments, and practices of global politics will the international order of nation-​states have become a supranational order of “agent-​neutral considerations.”7 These arguments for institutional cosmopolitanism are analytically rigorous. Since moral cosmopolitanism depends in these three respects on its institutional supplement, institutional cosmopolitanism provides a normative argument that frames the moral agenda of future global governance architecture. And, as the quotation given here makes clear with respect to existential challenges, this future is already the world’s present. Pogge’s own normative work has focused on the current structures that produce global poverty and, more recently, on global health.8 These vital issues are, however, only part of a larger systemic problematic. Given human planetary expansion and modern technology, the human species now faces historically unprecedented existential threats to its own sustainability.9 In the terms of Pogge’s impartiality argument, the lack of national neutrality in the design and practices of global regimes makes the imminence of these existential threats to the human species more probable. Institutional cosmopolitanism not only provides, therefore, a normative core to the future practice of global politics; following Pogge’s reasoning, it is needed now for the very possibility of this future. In these institutional terms, one can see which governance structures are required to solve, for example, the special challenges of nuclear weaponry, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the devastating consequences of a poorly rule-​bound, global economic 7. Thomas Pogge, “Concluding Reflections,” 298. 8. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, and Thomas Pogge, “Human Rights and Global Health: A Research Program,” Metaphilosophy, 36, nos.1–​2 (2005): 182–​209. 9. See Furio Cerutti, Global Challenges for Leviathan: A Political Philosophy of Nuclear Weapons and Global Warming (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). On a politics of preemption regarding these threats, see Richard Beardsworth, “Towards a Critical Concept of the Statesperson,” Journal of International Political Theory 13, no. 1 (2017): 100–​121.

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order. Quite simply, they require structures in which “agents are guided by agent-​neutral considerations.”10 Impartial rule-​making and rule implementation would be ideal; they are, however, presently unfeasible. The point sounds straightforwardly realist, but it is more than that due to institutional cosmopolitanism’s very awareness that it is now—​and not in the future of Kantian purpose—​that responses to existential challenges and threats are required. The most important question that emerges from institutional cosmopolitan argument is, therefore, neither whether we need further moral cosmopolitan enquiry or not, nor how we structure impartiality or not. With regard to existential challenges, the question is, rather, how a world of nation-​states proceeds from the present condition of international “nepotism” to more “impartial” structures of supranational governance so that these global threats and challenges can be addressed in the first place.11 This question is no longer immediately moral or immediately institutional. It is political. What, that is, are the relevant stepping-​stones from, in Pogge’s terms, “nepotism” to “impartiality”? For many, no radical reform appears possible, short of a crisis exogenous to the institutions and to the actors at stake.12 And yet, precisely when it is a question of existential threats such as nuclear conflict or climate change, reaction after the crisis will probably be too late. It is, therefore, both morally and strategically important to have a politics of preemption in their regard now. In response to the three concerns of institutional cosmopolitanism outlined here, I therefore suggest that the most important empirical challenge today for institutional cosmopolitanism is that of political agency, and that, within a prevailing system of states, global political agency redounds still—​if by no means exclusively—​to the state. If this is a reasonable deduction from the institutional cosmopolitan argument, an important consequence follows for thinkers and practitioners such as Pogge. Rather than disregarding national interest, loyalty, and commitment so that agent-​neutral practices are attained, intellectuals, academics, and practitioners should be harnessing global interest to national interest in order to make effective and legitimate solutions to civilizational challenges possible within the prevailing institutional structure of international politics (the state system). Therefore, institutional cosmopolitans require that capable

10. Pogge, “Concluding Reflections,” 298. 11.  Compare Barbara Buckinx, “Domination in Global Politics:  Reflections on Freedom and an Argument for Incremental Global Change” in Luis Cabrera, ed., Global Governance, Global Government: Institutional Visions for an Evolving World System (Albany: SUNY, 2012). 12.  See the diverse arguments presented in Thomas Hale, David Held, and Kevin Young, Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013). [ 62 ]  Richard Beardsworth

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nation-​states are politically willing to lead on the question of global threats and challenges so that global institutional change is effective. It is consequently important, I suggest, precisely not to seek to expunge national interest from global practices, but rather to align global human interest with national interest so that the gap between global common goods and national interests is narrowed and, concomitantly, states are motivated to reorganize the world.13 The first option (expunging national interest from global considerations) is moral, and institutional cosmopolitanism convincingly argues that an institutional supplement is required to make the moral option work in the first place. The second option (harnessing global interest to national interest) is political, in due recognition that institutional cosmopolitanism is not providing sufficient agent-​motivation for the architectural purpose it sets for itself. It can only work within the moral parameters of enlightened bureaucracy. Much more politics is needed, however, both to achieve the narrowing of the gap between global collective goods and national interests (as presently defined) and to motivate the action required to address existential challenges. As a contribution to this volume’s reflection on institutional cosmopolitanism, the rest of this chapter makes a layered set of arguments for a political cosmopolitanism that responds to this challenge. To preempt misunderstanding, I  do not understand the concept of political cosmopolitanism here in the commonly agreed terms of “world government” or “cosmopolitan democracy.”14 The latter are presently unfeasible, even if both are considered to make ultimate political sense, rightly or wrongly, of moral cosmopolitan claims.15 Rather, I  understand the term “political cosmopolitanism” as 13. This chapter focuses on governance of the world and state responsibility toward it in the context of Thomas Pogge’s concerns with impartiality. I assume that the gap between global/​human interests and national interests can best be narrowed by considering global responsibility to global threats and challenges in national terms: that is, as threats to the peoples of any particular state. As I argue later, as long as a transborder threat can be identified as a national threat, both theory and practice can redefine national interest so that this identification “global/​national” can work against embedded interests. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for requesting clarification on this point. For sustained argument on the point, see Richard Beardsworth, “The Political Moment:  Political Responsibility and Leadership in a Globalized, Fractured Age,” Journal of International Relations (forthcoming). 14.  On world government, see Campbell Craig, “The Resurgent Idea of World Government,” Ethics and International Affairs 22, no. 2 (2008):  133–​42; and Luis Cabrera, “World Government:  Renewed Debate, Persistent Challenges,” in European Journal of International Relations 16, no. 3 (2010): 511–​30. On cosmopolitan democracy, see David Held and Danielle Archibugi (eds.), Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995). 15.  On this issue, compare Luis Cabrera, Political Theory of Global Justice (London:  Routledge, 2004); Pavel Dufek, “Why Strong Moral Cosmopolitanism Requires a World-​ State,” International Theory 5, no. 2 (2013):  177–​ 212; William Scheuerman, “Cosmopolitanism and the World State,” Review of International Studies, 40, no. 3 (2014): 419–​41.

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follows:  attention to the political agency that is necessary to advance global governance regimes appropriate to meeting a specific array of global problems affecting humanity as a whole. My argument is political because it looks to political agency and political motivation, and because it considers the latter predominantly in terms of the marriage between interests. It is at the same time cosmopolitan because it, first, looks to solving challenges facing human civilization and, second, provides a baseline political argument for more reflexive, morally informed political choices.16 The rest of this chapter is accordingly divided into three parts. Part two argues that this political agency requires a marriage between national and global levels of interest and governance, and that cosmopolitan thought needs, at this historical conjuncture, to refocus its attention on the state and on state responsibility toward global threats in order to promote this marriage.17 Part three argues that, in distinction to recent and contemporary considerations of “good international citizenship” and “state responsibility” (for example, the concept of “special responsibilities” or that of “responsibility to protect”), a dual approach to global state responsibility is required. On the one hand, this approach looks to the state to pursue cosmopolitan commitments to a morally informed global legal order in which an increasing array of global actors—​ individuals, peoples, corporations, and states—​ become subjects of global law. On the other, it looks to a reconceptualization of the state’s understanding of political duty toward its own peoples in a globalized age of existential threats; and it argues that this reconfiguration of political duty is a necessary precondition of both the narrowing of the gap between global and national interests and, more long term, of any future global legal order. My focus in this chapter is mostly on this second “baseline” argument. Part four analyzes, accordingly, what this political duty entails, presents an argument for a republican cosmopolitan functionalism, and expounds the normative and empirical ground of global political agency in these terms. The conclusion pulls this layered political argument back to the concept and practice of institutional cosmopolitanism.

16.  For this precise formulation, I  am indebted to a recent discussion with Robyn Eckersley. 17.  See Richard Beardsworth, “When States Lead:  State Responsibility in a Globalized Age,” paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, Montreal, 2011; Garrett W. Brown, “Bringing the State Back into Cosmopolitanism:  The Idea of Responsible Cosmopolitan States,” Political Studies Review 9, no. 1 (2011):  53–​66; Richard Shapcott, “From the Good International Citizen to the Cosmopolitan Political Community:  A Constitutional Path,” International Politics 50 (2013): 138–​57. [ 64 ]  Richard Beardsworth

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3.2 COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE STATE: MARRIAGE BETWEEN THE NATIONAL AND THE GLOBAL

With important exceptions addressed later in this chapter, cosmopolitan reflection has had very little to say about the state’s transformative agency. Cosmopolitan neglect of the state as an agent of change is understandable for two reasons. First, the moral entity of concern to cosmopolitans remains the individual. All material and nonmaterial borders “above” this entity are morally arbitrary, in the specific sense that they have no counterbalancing moral weight. Thus supraindividual forms of association—​class, nation, race, or religion—​that do not respect the individual as “an end in itself” (in Kantian terms) are objects of criticism and reform.18 For cosmopolitans, therefore, the state can serve as a means to a cosmopolitan order (a “kingdom of ends”), but it has no moral purpose in itself. While this distinction allows the state to be a cosmopolitan actor, among others, in a world of states, cosmopolitan emphasis has predominantly fallen on the state as more of an obstacle to cosmopolitan concerns than as a means to advance them. This is particularly the case with regard to international relations (IR), a field, for both political realists and moral cosmopolitans, in which power and interest are preponderant. Second, since state borders are morally arbitrary, they are exclusionary by nature with respect to moral individualism. Together with the historical and social facts that states are driven by national interest as defined within these borders, and that national interest takes shape in the international environment as power, states present the primary obstacle to moral duty to nonnationals.19 Cosmopolitans have, therefore, placed much more focus on the agency of global civil society to effect reform toward a peaceful and just global order predicated on the fulfillment of human rights.20 If humanitarian interventionism presents an evident exception to globally minded civil practices, it is precisely state interest and power, on which interventionism is predicated, that have made military interventions “in the name of humanity” consistently problematic for cosmopolitan-​minded intellectuals.21 For these two reasons, state leadership on global challenges has not been a focus of moral or institutional cosmopolitan commitments. This lack of

18.  Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Prometheus Books, 1987). 19.  Hans Morgenthau, “A Realist Theory of International Politics,” in Hans Morgenthau, Power Among Nations:  A Struggle for Power and Peace. 7th ed. (Boston: McGraw-​Hill, 2005), 3–​17. 20. Jan Aart Scholte, “Global Civil Society,” in Ngaire Woods, The Political Economy of Globalization (London: Palgrave, 2000), 178–​90. 21.  For an analysis, see Richard Beardsworth, Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011), at 75–​110.

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emphasis on the state is unfortunate; it appears to translate into a refusal to address either history or contemporary reality. As a result—​certainly with respect to the academic discipline of IR—​cosmopolitan thought is confined to normative thought alone and is not considered a game-​changer. Due emphasis on the importance of the state is therefore needed for a sophisticated cosmopolitanism to have the political credentials that it deserves in a globalized, fractured world. Historically, world politics takes place within the empirico-​historical given of a “system of states.”22 During the last century, this system became global (even North Korea cannot exist outside the system’s basic terms of coexistence). It is overlaid with informal and formal rules that allow an “international society” of states to function and to express, to a greater or lesser extent, their common interests.23 In the last fifty years, the members that make up this system have lost power to transnational economic actors and are increasingly pressured by IOs from above, by global capital movements from the side, and by nationalism and regionalism from below. While persistent, the system is therefore mutating into what is presently called a “multiactor environment” brought about by technological and economic processes of globalization. And yet, from the perspective of contemporary history, the state has “returned” in importance despite this multiactor environment.24 There are at least three important reasons why. First, with the relative decline of the western powers and the relative ascent of the emerging powers, the pluralization of power centers foregrounds again the state unit in world politics. Second, the state (the developed state, at least) showed its huge political, administrative, and financial powers when it intervened throughout the world in 2008 to provide liquidity and credit to failing financial markets.25 Without the capacity and political agency of the state at that moment, the world would have entered an economic depression even though the coordination of the newly born G20 was critical.26 More important, this capacity is required to 22.  This given provides the starting point for IR theory. While postmodern and postcolonial theories criticize this given—​see Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss, Global Politics: A New Introduction (Routledge, 2013)—​I consider that one cannot effect sustainable change without passing through the concepts and practices of what is given. For a good illustration of this type of argument, see Stanley Hoffman, The Ethics and Politics of Humanitarian Intervention (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1996). 23.  See Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society:  A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); and Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, The Expansion of International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 24. “Returned” is in quotes because present history simply underscores the continuing domination of the state unit in world politics. 25. Simon Johnson and James Kwak, 13 Bankers: The Financial Meltdown and the Next Financial Crisis (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010). 26.  Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks:  What We’ve Learned—​and Still Have to Learn—​from The Financial Crisis (London: Allen Lane, 2014). [ 66 ]  Richard Beardsworth

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address global challenges in general. Since these challenges will increase in intensity and complexity during this century, the state will paradoxically retain its importance as it enters into a growing number of cooperation strategies. Third, in the post-​2008 era of fractured globalization, state leadership is required to meet the risks of nationalism and populism. Within these three aspects of history, cosmopolitans need, therefore, to address the following set of tensions. The processes of globalization undermine many facets of traditional state authority, both from the top down and from the bottom up. States remain, that said, resilient enough to ride these processes; but in doing so, they either resist the natural consequences of these processes (pooling and ceding sovereignty) or fail to manage them (systemic national and world disorder). Moral outcry at global poverty is one result of this new state condition. Political cynicism regarding the state’s ability to deal appropriately with terrorism is another. When it comes to existential threats such as climate change and nuclear weaponry, the state’s manifest inability to manage the global challenges looming over it makes it all the more clear that the state must pool and/​or cede sovereign power to robust international and supranational authorities. This cession requires, however (and precisely), state action itself, especially the sovereign act of giving up sovereign power. Our historical condition is, in this sense, one of a system of states in transition toward a postsovereign order, a condition in which the major international/​global actor remains, nevertheless, the state itself. To address, at the very least, the global threats to the human species that nuclear proliferation and climate change represent, cosmopolitanism must assume these tensions and consider the state as an agent of change within them. This requires explicit attention to the marriage between national and global levels of governance.

3.3 TOWARD A DUAL APPROACH TO GLOBAL STATE RESPONSIBILITY

The articulation between national and global levels of governance is currently thought in both academic and policy worlds in terms of state responsibility. Although it is often not clear exactly who or what is responsible, to whom, and for what, there are several fairly clear ways in which the concept is defined and practiced. I will consider them before expounding my own argument, as comparison will be helpful. In the discipline of IR, state responsibility is traditionally considered in terms of the special responsibilities of the “Great Powers.” Great power brings, it is said, great responsibility, as if, with the emergence of the system of states in Europe and its progressive global dissemination through colonization, world war, and decolonization, those states with the greatest power bear a R e f l e c t i o n s o n I n s t i t u t i o n a l C o s m op ol i ta n i s m  

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moral responsibility to uphold international order.27 The tenor of this responsibility does not come, however, from a moral duty to the populations of other nations. It is, more straightforwardly, the responsibility of a strong state to maintain the international order because it is strong within this order. In other words, in a system of coexistence, capability entails responsibility. This notion of state responsibility lends itself most obviously to international nepotism. The second notion of state responsibility of import is causal, and it is tied to the legal concept of liability. To what extent is a state, for example, still responsible for the legacies of the slave trade? To what extent is the German state responsible for the atrocities of the Third Reich? To what extent are India and China responsible for climate change? These ongoing questions indicate how state causal responsibility is a critical concept in both international law and world politics regarding historical and present behavior. It is also an essentially contested concept through which both legal responsibilities and power relations are channeled. The attribution of a state’s responsibility to x is, in other words, often a process through which power asymmetries are negotiated.28 It is from the 1970s, in particular since the end of the Cold War, that state responsibility has acquired an explicitly moral dimension. There are three major formulations of it: the good international citizen, the responsibility to protect (henceforth R2P), and the consistent call from members of the international community to x’s moral responsibility to act.29 Gareth Evans initially promoted the concept of the “good international citizen” while Australian foreign minister between 1988 and 199630; British foreign minister Robert Cooke attempted to implement the idea of foreign policy with an “ethical dimension” in 1998, and proponents of the English School in IR expounded it in academic terms through the decade. As Wheeler and Dunne argued at the time with an eye to New Labour’s “third way”: Realists argue that states will always manipulate the language of internationalism to cloak selfish ends, while cosmopolitan critics point to the corrupting

27. Inis Claude, “The Common Defense and Great-​Power Responsibilities,” Political Science Quarterly 101, no. 5 (1986): 719–​32; Bruce Jones, Carlos Pascual, and Stephen John Stedman, Power and Responsibility (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2009). 28.  For an effective critique of responsibility as liability, see Young, “A Social Connection Model.” 29. On good international citizenship, see Andrew Linklater, “The Good International Citizen and the Transformation of International Society,” in Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami, eds., The English School of International Relations (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008), 223–​58; on R2P, amidst an intellectual industry, see particularly the work of Alex Bellamy, Thomas Weiss, and Nicholas Wheeler. The phrase “our moral responsibility to act” is persistent in the media. 30. See N. Wheeler and T. Dunne, “Good International Citizenship: A Third Way for British Foreign Policy,” International Affairs 17, no. 4 (1998): 847–​70. [ 68 ]  Richard Beardsworth

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rather than civilizing power of the state in foreign-​policy making. Good international citizenship seeks to transcend these polarities by mapping out a third way which tames the element of brute power and looks to the reconciliation of order and justice in world politics.31

This third way required squaring the promotion of human rights abroad with long-​ term national interest and is achieved, in principle, through guaranteeing an increasingly rule-​bound international order. Within this order, states would become answerable to an emerging world community for the treatment of their citizens, just as, when judged capable, states would be both morally and legally duty-​bound to promote the welfare of the vulnerable belonging to other nations.32 The weaving of good international citizenship into the foreign policy of states took a hit after 9/​11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq (although criticized well before). During that time, however, Gareth Evans and others were already developing and promoting the concept of R2P, which, if different in function and modality, appears to have replaced the conceptual interest of the good international citizen in academic and policy circles.33 While restricting the concept of responsibility to the domestic dimension of humanitarian law, the promoters of R2P have also broadened it widely.34 Not only are states, according to this norm, now considered responsible for the welfare rights of their citizens; all competent states are considered responsible to fulfill these rights when the relevant state fails to do so. In this sense, R2P presents a revolutionary principle in IR, consolidating the enmeshment of global and national areas through globalization processes. If a state has external rights with regard to other states, it necessarily has responsibilities toward its own populations and, if capable, those of less capable states. It is no surprise that Russia and China heavily resist its enactment except in circumstances of genocide. It straightforwardly implies a new global liberal order in which international rights, on the one hand, and domestic and global responsibilities, on the other, are codependent.35

31. Wheeler and Dunne, “Good International Citizenship,” 856. 32. For theoretical elucidation of the concept, see Linklater, “The Good International Citizen.” 33.  Mlada Bukovansky, Ian Clark, Robyn Eckersley, Richard Price, Christian Reus-​ Smit, and Nicholas J. Wheeler, Special Responsibilities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), extend the “good international citizenship” theme by looking at the ethical responsibilities of great powers toward the vulnerable. 34.  Richard Beardsworth, “Cosmopolitan Theory and World Politics:  An Argument for Cosmopolitan Realism,” in S. G. Nelson and N. Soguk, eds., Modern Theory, Modern Power, and World Politics, Ashgate Research Companion Series (London:  Ashgate, 2016), 373–​90. 35. These comments are made to one side of the empirical liberal failures of humanitarian interventionism.

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Lastly, state responsibility is consistently considered in moral terms for lack of any political mechanism of global collective action. Real-​world examples include the failure to stop genocide in Rwanda in 1994, to complete the Doha round of world trade negotiations in 2006, to forge a new global agreement on differentiated responsibilities at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009, and to intervene in Syria from 2012. In these instances, Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, Gordon Brown, Barack Obama, Catherine Ashton, and their delegated spokespeople all repetitively foregrounded the notion of the international community’s “moral responsibility to act.” While first directed toward Western powers, this notion is now also aimed at the emerging powers with regard to climate change mitigation, global balances of trade, and financial stability, as well as resource depletion. On these issues, the international community’s “moral responsibility to act” certainly reflects a general moral duty to avert human suffering; but it serves, at one and the same time, to accuse particular states of not assuming their causal responsibilities or of glossing over its radical lack of global collective action. This account of recent conceptions of state responsibility is too brief. It points nevertheless to a couple of important observations. First, it shows how the concept of state responsibility has come to stand for the articulation between national government and the requirements of global governance. Second, it shows how this articulation is predicated on different combinations of altruism and national interest. Even if these combinations anticipate a rule-​ bound global order, the responsibility that they entail is, however, not rule-​ bound. The principle of R2P remains, for example, an international norm, the weight of which in IR depends on each respective performance of international responsibility. A more solid ground for global state responsibility is urgently needed to secure a marriage between national government and global governance structures, and thereby help solve existential challenges to human civilization. It is here that I  would suggest the interest of a dual approach to state responsibility—​one that focuses, according to circumstance and context, on political as well as moral motivation. What exactly do I  mean by this? The moral approach to state responsibility constitutes a cosmopolitan reflection on the kinds of responsibility expounded thus far. It considers, in sum, the state as a moral agent promoting a global civilized order based on the supranational rule of law.36 The subjects of cosmopolitan law would be not only states, but also individuals and transnational corporations, substates, and stateless 36.  For an analysis tending in this vein, see Garrett W. Brown, Grounding Cosmopolitanism:  From Kant to the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Constitution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). For work on state moral agency, see Tony Erskine, “Assigning Responsibilities to Institutional Moral Agents,” in her Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations (London: Palgrave, 2003), 19–​40. [ 70 ]  Richard Beardsworth

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migrants; and the issues under global law would range from peace to climate change adaptation. This vision of an accountable, global legal order remains important as a normative horizon guiding enlightened state leadership. Moral motivation on the part of enlightened states will not suffice, however, to bridge the present gap between national government and global governance and solve civilizational challenges like climate change or nuclear weaponry. A distinct conception of political responsibility is also required, so that the concept and practice of a national government’s primary responsibility toward its own people are reconfigured in the context of a globalizing world. As a result, responsible state actors would work together for the common global good out of their own interest and in fulfillment of their own people’s needs. This reconfiguring of state political responsibility toward its own national citizens lays out, in other words, a “baseline” argument for political action. The next section seeks to define what this argument entails.

3.4 POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY IN A GLOBALIZED AGE

The state’s responsibility toward its own people entails, first, the political duty to govern for the security and basic welfare of that people (at the very least, in liberal societies).37 This “duty to govern,” as Leslie Green has argued (commenting on the philosopher John Finnis), can be exclusively justified in terms of effective capacity.38 Given both the plurality of states in world politics and global challenges, Green’s minimalist justification is initially useful for assessing political responsibility in a globalized age. The duty to govern, he continues, is “called forth by the needs of the common good. . . . [And] those who have the effective capacity to solve it bear the responsibility of doing so.”39 In this functional approach to government, political authority is exercised where there is a problem to be solved, and it should be exercised by those who have the effective capacity to solve it.40 As a question of task efficacy, political responsibility entails, in sum, government: the management of political, social, and economic events in order to maintain the “basic goods” of 37. This section reproduces arguments from Richard Beardsworth, “From Moral to Political Responsibility in a Globalized Age,” Ethics and International Affairs 29, no. 1 (2015): 71–​92. 38. See Leslie Green, “The Duty to Govern,” Legal Theory 13, nos. 3–​4 (2007): 165–​85. 39. Ibid, 166, 171. 40. For an excellent account of the functional approach to government, see Cornelia Navari, “David Mitrany and International Functionalism,” in David Long and Peter Wilson, eds., Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis:  Inter-​War Idealism Reassessed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 215–​46; see also Lucian Ashworth and David Long, eds., New Perspectives on International Functionalism (Basingstoke, UK:  Palgrave Macmillan, 1998).

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a people; good government means that the primary needs of a people (or the basic rights of a people) are satisfied. If one follows this definition of political responsibility, our common conceptions of national government responsibility to its people are modified in an age of interdependence. If states are, according to the governing principle, duty-​bound to meet the basic needs of their peoples—​if, that is, the fulfillment of need is a primary political duty of government—​and if these needs are now systemically determined by events beyond the borders of the governed polity, then it follows that, within the very concept of political duty, those states that are affected and able to respond have a responsibility to do so in order to answer their people’s needs in the first place. In other words, to govern the needs of their own populations, states and their governments have the political responsibility to manage transborder events that qualitatively affect these needs. This concept of political responsibility thereby bridges the gap between national government and global governance structures within the rule-​bound concept of task efficacy. Transborder events can be categorized on a sliding scale of existential intensity and systemic risk. Nuclear arms, climate change, and the structural consequences of a global capitalist economy are currently considered three predominant problems that demand global collective action on the part of national governments. Since these issues all involve “hard” issues of security (from nuclear to food and water security), strong political responses are increasingly necessary. In order to fulfill the needs of the state’s people, the state leader needs, therefore, to pool the sovereignty of the state with other states or cede sovereignty to supranational authority in order to secure his or her people against global existential threat. If, in other words, efficacy of remedy is only possible through delegation, and/​or cession of state power, the internal sovereignty of the state is only maintained by qualifying the state’s external sovereignty with regard to other states and IOs.41 The willingness of governments to cede some of their unilateral decision-​making power to international agencies—​while not full cession of sovereignty—​demonstrates that governments do see the benefits to their own populations of “pooling sovereignty” in such areas as maritime law, international trade standards, and communication systems. In these areas of “low” politics, governments have delegated powers to an external authority, over which they have no veto. In addition, this is the case, to varying extents, with 41.  For the distinction between internal and external sovereignty, see Robert Jackson, Quasi-​ States:  Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 39–​49. On the importance of this distinction for a postnational progressive politics, see Miriam Ronzoni, “Two Conceptions of State Sovereignty and Their Implications for Global Design,” in Critical Review of International and Political Philosophy 15, no. 5 (2012):  573–​91. I  return to Ronzoni’s excellent argument later. [ 72 ]  Richard Beardsworth

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regard to regional and global security networks, tackling international crime (such as trafficking and money laundering), and terrorism. My argument is that it should now be the case as well when dealing with existential threats that affect the internal sovereignty of a state (the physical welfare of its people). If the argument appears to be one of perverse self-​interest in the context of institutional cosmopolitanism, I wish to be consequentialist. By attending to its own people’s needs regarding global problems, a particular state’s action in concert with other states is, necessarily, also attending to the needs of other populations. This is the political point. A state can assume global political responsibility in its own interest and, at the same time, produce both acts for others and new supranational bodies. As a result, a “baseline” argument for political action involving both the present and the future is made. The political authority of those who govern, however, cannot be dealt with in exclusive terms of effective capacity and managerial government. First, the needs fulfilled bespeak a “common good” (however fragile), and this common good needs to be appraised in any theory of global state responsibility. Second, functionalist technocracies beget populism, if not neofascism: in other words, the very gap between national and global levels of governance that I  wish to address. The marriage between them requires also political legitimacy in order to stem the contemporary process of delegitimization common to both. National government responsibility toward its own people requires that international and/​or supranational action to secure this people’s security and welfare is legitimate in national terms. Political duty, or the duty to govern, should be considered, accordingly, in two interrelated stages of efficacy and legitimacy. The question regarding global challenges and existential threats is: what are the terms of global/​national political authority for states? In political theoretical terms, I consider the language of republicanism and republican federalism the most promising for a globalized age under existential threat. Let me lay out briefly here two reasons why the concept of political responsibility I seek might be best articulated in these terms.42 This section will thereby make a general argument for republican functionalism. The first reason, expounded best by the Federalist Papers and recently rehearsed by Daniel Deudney in Bounding Power:  Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village, concerns the size and scope of the polity 42. For the definition of republican freedom as one of nondomination, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1997). See also Steven Slaughter, Liberty Beyond Neo-​Liberalism:  A Republican Critique of Liberal Governance in a Globalizing Age (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). For a republican, I am “dominated” if my ability to make choices is interfered with not simply concretely, but also structurally. Institutions such as government are therefore necessary conditions of freedom to prevent structural partiality.

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with regard to a people’s freedom from violence and domination. As Deudney persuasively argues, the “freedom of the citizenry from violence” is relative to the state’s capacity for overcoming violence.43 Following his reading of the “Philadelphian system,” the security threat to the individual US states posed by British, French, and Spanish military interference could only be remedied by an increase in the size and scope of political association.44 Without this increase of scale, freedom from the arbitrary violence of the European powers would be lost. With an increase in scale, freedom could be renegotiated in the new context of extended military powers (that is, the Atlantic projection of sea power by European states). This republican renegotiation of freedom entailed a new articulation, in turn, of local and distant structures of government with regard to both external and internal domination (anarchy and hierarchy). Republican federalism answered, therefore, both the security threat abroad and the political risk of new domestic tyranny (a centralized political union). The Philadelphian system furthers, in sum, the legacy of the classical republican tradition in the material context of new technologies of destruction and extended geography. Since Deudney’s materialist argument offers an initial schema for a fundamental logic of freedom for states in a globalized age,45 it provides terms of articulation between national and global levels of governance that can be built into a narrative of political legitimacy. This is why the republican narrative is interesting for my purposes. Delegating power upward or sideways (ceding or pooling sovereignty) in order to address specific threats of a transborder nature, the state is not only answering the needs of its people, it is also ensuring their freedom from both empirical and structural forms of violence. To return to my previous examples, we can no longer think of these forms of violence in terms of traditional existential threats and enemies. That said, the concrete events of climate change (floods and droughts), the devastating consequences of capital accumulation (financial runs, sudden food price hikes, or pharmaceutical cartels), and the structural logic of nuclear weaponry (the domination of peoples by fear) render the modern concept of national political freedom as redundant as does organized human aggression. The political duty, accordingly, to govern these empirical and structural forms of violence through a marriage between the global and the national can be made not 43. Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 27. 44. Deudney, Bounding Power, 161–​87. 45. For a strong critique of Deudney’s concept of republicanism from a social democratic perspective, see William Scheuerman, The Realist Case for Global Reform (Cambridge, UK:  Polity Press, 2011), 136–​43. See my paper “Can the Language of Republicanism Help to Bridge the Gap Between the National and the Global?” (ISA annual conference, Toronto, 2014) for an elaborated discussion of these issues. [ 74 ]  Richard Beardsworth

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simply in terms of needs, but also in the name of republican freedom qua freedom from arbitrary interference or domination. Following the Federalist Papers, Deudney’s republican security theory thus offers an account of political authority, in the context of security efficacy and polity size, which marries the national with the global through the concept of post-​Machiavellian civic freedom. In the context of existential threats, national government’s responsibility to its people requires the negotiation of sovereignty and supranational authority in the very name of this people’s sovereignty. This analytical and normative argument regarding global problems needs to be made boldly against current forms of economic utilitarianism and populist nationalism. The second reason for looking carefully at contemporary republican thought for framing national government responsibility toward global threats follows. In contrast, perhaps, with institutional cosmopolitanism, republicanism does not consider that power or self-​interest can be expunged from governmental rule-​making (national or supranational). As a result, its institutional inventions are based on the principle of mutual constraint.46 The freedom of the American republic from external domination required, at one and the same time, both central government and resistance to domestic hierarchy. Republican federalism was the American institutional response, although this response only took its proper form a century later, through the violence of a devastating civil war. We see today in Europe that pooling and cession of national sovereignty to a more centralized European polity fosters sovereigntism together with nostalgia for a world of nations. To counter the latter not only requires, as before, an analytical and normative argument regarding both the effective management of problems and the possibility of securing modern freedom in a globalized age, it also requires both effective and legitimate institutional mediation between national and global levels of governance. The state is again the formative political agent here, as it learns to delegate power upward to supranational bodies, sideways to international authority, and downward to substate entities (nations or regions). It is to this latter point that the problem-​dependent dimension to the argument returns. Let me keep to examples of power-​delegation upward since my focus is the global/​national conundrum. With respect to the control of nuclear weaponry as the condition of nuclear disarmament, a global monopoly on state and nonstate nuclear violence is necessary. In the very name of freedom from nuclear domination, states should therefore actively promote a supranational governance mechanism that pools the ignition of nuclear arms. With regard to climate change adaptation, a functional agency of supranational oversight is required not only to supervise vital technology transfers

46. See No. 10 of the Federalist Papers.

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across nations, but, more important here, to constrain bilateral agreements between nations that maintain power asymmetries and stall national survival and development. Concerning tax evasion in a global economy, in order, precisely, to have mastery over its own economic development, a state requires global corporate tax regulation.47 Without a supranational regulatory institution, transnational capital flows and tax havens prevent national self-​governance. This is an excellent example of internal state sovereignty requiring the delegation of external sovereignty to supranational regulation in order to retain its meaning in an interdependent world.48 For each of these global problems, institutional innovation is required, for which the state remains the major actor, and the languages of republicanism and republican federalism can contribute to providing the terms of ideological legitimacy. This argument about republican legitimacy will be unpersuasive for those on the Right and the Left, who see supranational authority as severely weakening localized legitimacy by instituting new forms of technocratic and elitist domination over democratic self-​determination. For these critics, political responsibility is about safeguarding this democratic right and its institutional embodiments. This type of argument is itself politically irresponsible, for both empirical and normative reasons. As the French sociologist Pierre Rosanvallon argues, given the empirical complexity of contemporary social functions, modern national democracies are increasingly decentralized.49 Courts, commissions, and review bodies that are isolated from direct public oversight constitute a growing part of our national democratic life and ensure, in principle, the “impartiality” (to use Pogge’s term) of both the branches of government and market society. To argue for a more mediated, more republican understanding of democratic self-​determination today, based on mutual constraint, is consequently more attuned to present realities than that of the concept of democratic participation. It is also politically irresponsible for normative reasons. As I argued previously, following the work of Miriam Ronzoni and her colleagues, national fiscal sovereignty (the fiscal base that allow for a politics of redistribution within the state) now requires the supplement of supranational authorities of

47.  See, in particular, Peter Dietsch’s excellent Catching Capital:  The Ethics of Tax Competition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 48. Ronzoni, “Two Conceptions of State Sovereignty.” 49.  Pierre Rosanvallon, Democratic Legitimacy:  Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity, trans. Andrew Goldhammer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). For the argument that there exists no democratic deficit in the EU polity anyway in comparison to existing democratic institutions, see Andrew Moravcsik, “Is There a ‘Democratic Deficit’ in World Politics? A Framework for Analysis,” Government and Opposition 39, no. 2 (2004): 336–​63. [ 76 ]  Richard Beardsworth

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capital oversight and regulation given the differential landscape of global capitalism (innate capital mobility toward profit). A marriage between the global and the national is, in other words, required for national sovereignty to have domestic political significance in a globalized age. Consequently, pooling or cession of sovereignty does not have to constitute a trade-​off between efficacy and democratic legitimacy. It can be considered, rather, to anticipate new forms of democratic legitimacy that are based on what is already happening within the nation-​state. It is in terms of these institutional arguments that national government responsibility to its people can form the bridge between national and global governance levels and, out of its own interest, can promote a more cosmopolitan global order. In sum, a narrative of republican functionalism framing national political responsibility is required to open up the very possibility of institutional cosmopolitanism.

3.5 CONCLUSION

In the introduction, I quoted Thomas Pogge’s advocation of a move from national nepotism to supranational impartiality so that major challenges to the human species could be addressed. The sincerity and urgency of Pogge’s call cannot be ignored. To answer it, however, I have argued that his institutional cosmopolitan argument needs to be turned on its head. Rather, that is, than looking to transcend national interest, cosmopolitan-​minded academics and practitioners should show how states can reconfigure their understanding of interest and power so that assuming global challenges is explicitly considered to meet both their people’s needs and their common good as free peoples. We need, quite simply, a bottom-​up approach to institutional cosmopolitanism if Pogge’s opening point that global governance structures cannot solve civilizational challenges is to be addressed through effective political agency. For this, a cosmopolitan focus not just on global civil society, but also on the state, is required. To forge an effective and legitimate convergence between the national and the global, national governments and state leaders require, in turn, a new narrative of political duty and political responsibility. I  have focused on a political language of responsibility to do this within the wider context of a dual approach to state responsibility. In contrast, therefore, to current understandings of international moral responsibility, I  have advanced this responsibility in republican functionalist terms. The functionalist (task efficacy) and republican (freedom from violence/​domination) arguments work together both to answer problem-​specific requirements and to provide a narrative of legitimacy that aims to mend the present polarization between global elitism and national populism. R e f l e c t i o n s o n I n s t i t u t i o n a l C o s m op ol i ta n i s m  

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The specific categories of my argument need to be made more context-​ dependent. That said, the argument seeks to theorize the political baseline for more ambitious cosmopolitan projects in a globalized age; it looks to the most effective agent of change for that purpose within a complex system of states; and it reconceptualizes state responsibility to its own people to that end. Since existential threats to the human species, in the shape of a nuclear war or climate change catastrophe, are an immediate priority, this political baseline to institutional cosmopolitan argument serves to foreground the global terms of state political agency at this historical moment.

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CHAPTER 4

The Responsible Cosmopolitan State RICHARD SHAPCOT T  

4.1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter provides a preliminary defense of the idea of a domestic “cosmopolitan” constitution. It investigates the theoretical possibilities for institutionalizing cosmopolitan values into the constitution of the republican state. The main agenda is to make the case for a cosmopolitan political theory suitable for informing the design of national constitutions. Andrew Linklater has argued that the modern state institutionalized an enduring tension between our status as human beings and as citizens by recognizing the legal and moral standing of members of political communities in relation to each other, while curtailing their obligations to outsiders. Cosmopolitan political theorizing seeks to identify the normative, praxeological, and sociohistorical conditions for resolving this conflict. One of the challenges for cosmopolitan thinking is to find ways to reconfigure the balance between our obligations to our fellow compatriots and to humanity in such a way that they are not mutually exclusive.

   The author would like to acknowledge the numerous helpful insights received in writing this chapter, in particular from Richard Beardsworth, Garrett W. Brown, and Andrew Linklater, who gave crucial encouragement at various stages. My colleagues at the University of Queensland, Martin Weber, Chris Reus-​Smit, Kath Gelber, and Ryan Walter, all contributed in different ways. The chapter benefited from comments at various workshops and conferences, including the Oceanic Conference on International Studies at the University of Melbourne in July 2014, the International Studies Association Meeting in 2013, Western Political Science Association meeting 2013; and also from the students and staff, including Terry Nardin and Will Bain, at the National University of Singapore.

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Anticosmopolitans such as David Miller argue that recognizing substantial obligations to humanity necessarily entails overriding national or state levels of deliberation and obligation and replacing them with a single global political unit.1 Miller argues that meaningful cosmopolitanism can only take a “strong” form associated with ambitious programs along global egalitarian lines.2 Cosmopolitan thought, therefore, faces at least two agendas in the challenge of reconciling humanity and citizenship. It has to recognize and incorporate the self-​determining capacities of independent political communities at the same time as identifying means whereby those communities can be restrained by cosmopolitan norms both at home and abroad. What follows is the first part of an investigation into one means whereby individual states can become more unilaterally cosmopolitan and achieve both national self-​determination and more cosmopolitan restraints on state action. This chapter follows Thomas Pogge’s identification of a “middle” position focusing on the political community’s negative cosmopolitan obligations to avoid harming outsiders.3 In this account of cosmopolitanism, self-​determining, autonomous political communities can retain high levels of autonomy as long as this does not harm the capacities of other states and peoples. Recognizing and upholding such obligations do not necessarily entail or imply the existence of global institutions. Instead, they require only a recognition on the part of the state and its population that their own political self-​determination can impose harms or costs on outsiders’ similar capacities. In this context, this chapter specifically takes up G. W. Brown’s invitation to investigate “what normative requirements a cosmopolitical state would need to satisfy internally and externally in order to satiate the moral, legal, and institutional demands of cosmopolitanism.”4 The first section examines some aspects of the relationship between cosmopolitanism, the state, and the sources of cosmopolitan transformation. It identifies the relative absence of engagement with domestic state-​level transformation as a means for achieving cosmopolitan goals as a limitation of cosmopolitan political theorizing. It then identifies the cosmopolitan harm principle as a formulation that opens the way for a state-​based account of cosmopolitan responsibilities. The next step demonstrates how this dovetails with the republican principle of nondomination by requiring the establishment of nondominating relations with outsiders. This approach is inspired by, while modifying, the cosmopolitanism begun by Kant, which envisages a pacific federation of republican states 1. David Miller, “Cosmopolitanism: A Critique,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5(2002): 80–​85. 2. Miller, “Cosmopolitanism,” 84. 3.  Thomas Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism:  A Defence,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5(2002), no. 3, 86–​91. 4.  Garrett W. Brown, “Bringing the State Back into Cosmopolitanism:  The Idea of Responsible Cosmopolitan States,” Political Studies Review 9(2011): 53–​66, at 54. [ 80 ]  Richard Shapcott

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arising from transformations of the domestic social contract.5 Specifically, it suggests a return to Kant’s focus on the cosmopolitan potentialities within republican states. The chapter then explores a previously unexamined cosmopolitan potentiality within republican political theory’s account of domination and argues for an extension of the republican nondominating constitution to outsiders. Domestic constitutional requirements can perform the task of constraining state action in the international realm in accordance with cosmopolitan rights. It rests on a background assumption of a condition of globalization and complex interdependence between states, such that states have exponentially increased their capacity to harm and dominate those beyond their borders. Under such conditions in republican states, cosmopolitan constitutional clauses can provide the basic rules limiting a state’s capacities for domination beyond its borders, even in the absence of any global republican constitutional equivalent. In this way, republican states can become agents of cosmopolitan change and can take up their cosmopolitan obligations unilaterally by drawing upon their own internal principles.6 Thus, republican thought directs us to identify the domestic legal institutional responses that are open to states under cosmopolitan conditions of interdependence. Thinking about cosmopolitanism from “the bottom up,” or the inside out, so to speak, in this way overcomes the disadvantages often associated with “thick” cosmopolitanism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the republican concern with minimizing the harm of domination through the rule of law might be extended to include those not party to the social contract via the means of constitutional modification.7 As such, it presents both a plausible step toward realizing cosmopolitan values in the world as it is, and one that may, in the spirit of Kant, pave the way for revolutionary transformations.

4.2 COSMOPOLITANISM, THE STATE, AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

At best, cosmopolitanism has had an ambivalent relationship to the state and to the idea of particularistic political communities. Because for cosmopolitans, our standing as humans trumps our standings as citizens, the state has only a secondary or derivative moral significance. The problem with states 5.  Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983). 6. This by no means excludes other possibilities, such as incorporating international law or responding to global normative change. 7.  Andrew Linklater, “The Problem of Community in International Relations,” Alternatives 15(1990): 135–​53.

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for cosmopolitans is that separate social contracts are unjustifiable when constituted with reference only to those who are already included. The decision to establish a social contract is not an entitlement to disregard the legitimate interests of outsiders and must be consistent with a global common good, or at the very least not make its members the “enemy of humankind.” The obligations that contractors may have to each other do not exhaust or remove their moral duties to outsiders. This section discusses the cosmopolitan ambivalence toward the state and domestic social contract and the cosmopolitan tendency to pursue transnational solutions to overcome the problems associated with the social contract’s exclusivity. Social contract thinking can be roughly divided between the Hobbesian approach, giving priority to internal conceptions of obligation and unconcerned with duties to outsiders; and the Kantian (and natural law) approaches, which seek to nestle our domestic contracts within an account of universal duties.8 At least since Kant, cosmopolitans have contested the internal conception of obligation, associated with Hobbes, Pufendorf, and others, which accompanies the idea of the state as an expression of the social contract. The internal view argues that the domestic social contract provides the grounds of mutual obligation between the contractors only. As Michael Walzer suggests, the social contract turns the state into a club: members define themselves for their own purposes, without reference to the interests of others.9 Cosmopolitans criticize this aspect of the social contract, and by extension, the nature of the national constitution. They argue, following Kant, that while the duties we owe compatriots are indeed special, they are not exhaustive of our general cosmopolitan duties to humanity: “[S]‌pecial associations can increase what we owe our associates but they cannot decrease what we owe everyone else.”10 The Kantian draws this conclusion, as Linklater notes, because Kant derived obligation immediately from moral duty. The duty to belong to the state emanated from the fact that the pursuit of any one man’s happiness and security should not be incompatible with the equal liberty of others. And because this was so, the state could not be considered a sufficient juridical community; the primary importance of justice required that outsiders too be brought within a common moral framework.11

8.  Martha Nussbaum, “Toward a Globally Sensitive Patriotism,” Daedalus 3(2008): 78–​93. 9. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). 10. Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism,” 91. 11.  Andrew Linklater, Men and Citizens in International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1990). [ 82 ]  Richard Shapcott

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Such considerations lead to conclusions such as Henry Shue’s, that “it is impossible to settle the magnitude of one’s duties in justice (if any) toward the fellow members of one’s nation-​state . . . prior to and independent of settling the magnitude of one’s duties in justice (if any) toward non-​members.”12 The domestic social contract that establishes the exclusive nation-​state, therefore, is incomplete unless it also establishes a just relationship with nonmembers. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most pervasive cosmopolitan response to the state and to the balance of obligations between humanity and citizenship has been to either seek to transcend the state entirely by constructing a world state,13 or to embed it in global democratic institutions or some form of transnational legal or political order.14 For instance, the Rawlsian cosmopolitical theories of Charles Beitz and Darrel Moellendorf contain elaborate normative defenses of global distributive justice. Their work implies that states should pursue egalitarian global institutions or be assessed against a Rawlsian global standard to which they should conform. David Held, Daniele Archibugi, James Bohman, and others have advocated visionary global political reforms to establish cosmopolitan democracy.15 Consequently, cosmopolitan political theorizing in recent decades has arguably been characterized by a relative lack of interest, if not outright rejection, of the state as a cosmopolitan agent and a source of cosmopolitan praxis. The state as a vehicle for a cosmopolitan middle path has not appeared to be an obvious candidate.16 12. Henry Shue, “Exporting Hazards,” Ethics 91(1981): 579–​606, at 603. 13. Luis Cabrera, Political Theory of Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State (London: Routledge, 2004). 14.  Underlying the cosmopolitan turn to transnationalism are two further assumptions; the first is the practical problem of coordination:  large issues require global coordination to solve them, and thus global institutions and therefore global legitimacy are required. The other is that states are unable or unwilling, or are not predisposed, to undertake unilateral measures for making themselves accountable to outsiders. It is only when free-​rider and mutual gain issues have been resolved that states will be willing to sacrifice their unilateral freedom to act. 15. See, for instance, James Bohman, Democracy Across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2007); David Held, “Cosmopolitan Democracy and the Global Order,” in J. Bohman and M. Lutz-​Bachman, eds., Perpetual Peace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Daniele Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). In more recent publications, Held has acknowledged the state’s role as a transitionary agent; see David Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010). 16. By “cosmopolitan political theorizing,” I mean those authors seeking to defend a comprehensive cosmopolitan theory. See, for instance, Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Darrel Moellendorf, Cosmopolitan Justice (Boulder: Westview, 2002). I am making a distinction between cosmopolitan political theorizing and cosmopolitan ethics; the first involves “grand theory,” while the second applies to critiques of specific currently existing practices. The target of my enquiry is changes to the political system along cosmopolitan lines, which might engender or require changes in the practices of states.

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Similarly, international legal theorists have argued that states can become more cosmopolitan by having their legal sovereignty superseded by a transnational or cosmopolitan legal order (CLO): “a transnational legal system in which all public officials bear the obligation to fulfill the fundamental rights of every person within their jurisdiction, without respect to nationality or citizenship.”17 In these cases, the onus is on domestic law to conform with the transnational order.18 Such a vision may also take the form of a transnational or “global” constitution, in which a transnational, cosmopolitan form of legal/​institutional order coexists with, complements, or supersedes national law. These ideas see states entering into a situation where they accept transnational cosmopolitan law as part of their domestic legal framework and surrender part of their autonomy to that law, from which national law must be derived. Global constitutionalists, according to Jean Cohen, see a global legal order as having precedence over domestic law, in which domestic law’s legitimacy is derived from or secondary to the global cosmopolitan constitution.19 In a similar vein, Seyla Benhabib advocates what she calls cosmopolitan federalism,20 whereby states incorporate cosmopolitan hospitality norms, recognizing the human, and not just civil, rights of noncitizens and “resident aliens,” thus anchoring domestic law in international or cosmopolitan law. In these scenarios, the

17.  Alec Stone-​Sweet, “A Cosmopolitan Legal Order:  Constitutional Pluralism and Rights Adjudication in Europe,” Global Constitutionalism 1(2012): 53–​90. 18. The cosmopolitanism of these cases is largely domestic or concerned with rights of “outsiders” once they have arrived; legal requirements perform the task of constraining state action in the domestic realm in accordance with cosmopolitan rights. This is relevant later in the discussion, where the emphasis turns to state obligations abroad. 19.  At its most extreme, according to Cohen, global constitutionalism claims that national “legal orders are not supreme or autonomous, their constitutions do not derive their validity from their own grundnorm, nor can their constitutional legal orders be imputed to their own autonomous demos (the idea of popular sovereignty) as the highest source. Rather states in the relevant aspects, are now construed as organs of the constitutional globalizing international legal system. . . . their legal systems have their condition of validity not in themselves but in the higher supreme autonomous international legal order. . . . : the latter is supreme over the domestic constitutional orders of state and trumps any agreement they make.  .  .  . states and their citizens must understand themselves as the constituent part of a politically constituted world society with the (UN) charter as the constitutional document . . .” Jean Cohen, Globalisation and Sovereignty:  Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), 48–​49. Cohen is correct to point out that this ignores rather a lot of inconvenient truths about the nature of the relationship between politics and law, historically and politically. Most important, she points out that “sovereign states certainly do not deem their sovereignty as delegated by international law or as derivative from an international or global ‘grundnorm,” ’ Globalisation and Sovereignty, 67. 20. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Conclusion. [ 84 ]  Richard Shapcott

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state is restricted in its sovereignty by cosmopolitan laws and institutions situated “above” it or outside it. Many of these arguments suggest that Miller’s concerns regarding strong cosmopolitanism are warranted to the extent that national states must be transcended by the development of postsovereign, post-​Westphalian, global democratic, and cosmopolitan legal orders in which the state’s sovereignty is submitted to or overridden by cosmopolitan legal and political structures. However, “strong cosmopolitanism” is not the only solution consistent with a cosmopolitan reconciliation of citizenship and humanity. In recent debates, a number of cosmopolitan scholars have argued that cosmopolitanism requires a serious engagement with the state and its possibilities since in theory and practice, the state remains an important actor and possible source and focus of cosmopolitan practice.21 Corduourier-​Real argues, for instance, that even a concern with global equality means that it is “necessary to count on the political means of the state to address both local and global injustice. . . . in order to be clear about who is failing to accomplish obligations of justice.”22 Without denying the emergence of new forms of global governance, these authors argue the state remains the locus of democratic legitimacy and a source of unrivalled concentration of power. The general tenor of these arguments is that, for better or worse, we live in a world of states, many of them republican in some form or another, where most of the people of the world accept that they should be governed by rules that they have made, i.e. that are made for and by their own communities. Thus, Lea Ypi argues that popular sovereignty “allows cosmopolitan obligations to enter a collective deliberative process enabling the transformation of political institutions in accordance with cosmopolitan goals.”23 In this view, the adoption of cosmopolitan norms by a state ultimately requires domestic consent and democratic forms of legitimation, and will likely be more acceptable and legitimate when seen as the product of domestic political deliberation. Therefore, cosmopolitanism requires an attempt to “bring the state back in” for both praxeological reasons, to identify viable ways in which the path to a cosmopolitan future might be pursued, as well as theoretical reasons, because states are morally defensible forms of political self-​determination that should be incorporated into cosmopolitan theory. It is this context that gave rise to Brown’s call to examine “what cosmopolitan values a state may still provide, what a normatively responsible 21.  See, for instance, Lea Ypi, “Statist Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 16(2008): 48–​71; Brown, “Bringing the State Back into Cosmopolitanism”; Richard Beardsworth, Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011). 22.  Carlos Cordourier-​Real, Transnational Social Justice (Basingstoke, UK:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 112. 23. Ypi, “Statist Cosmopolitanism,” 51.

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cosmopolitan state might actually look like, and how responsible cosmopolitan states could help ground a cosmopolitan condition.”24 However, what follows is another question:  what principles ought to inform cosmopolitan responsibility? In other words, what should cosmopolitan states be responsible for? Much of the focus of cosmopolitan proposals has been on how a state can transform its domestic practices, and what it does within its borders, in line with cosmopolitan values. An underdeveloped goal, but one that is equally important, is to identify principles and institutional reforms that states can adopt unilaterally to govern their relationships with outsiders, individual and collective, to make them responsible for their actions beyond their borders. More specifically, it is to identify the ways in which self-​legislating communities can exercise responsibility beyond their borders. One answer to Brown’s questions can be found in Linklater’s claim that the cosmopolitan political community is one that acknowledges its responsibility to avoid harming outsiders unjustifiably. According to Linklater, the harm principle, that we ought not harm each other unnecessarily or unjustifiably, provides the basis for cosmopolitan state practice.25 States harm outsiders in a number of ways, including not seeking the consent of the excluded for their initial act of exclusion. Further, states restrict the free movement of people across the globe and arbitrarily limit the access of outsiders to natural resources to which all humans have entitlements. In addition, states allow harm to outsiders because they may have few limitations on the exporting of practices, standards, and material substances that are known to harm and that may be domestically prohibited. A  cosmopolitan account of the social contract suggests that states retain their obligation to avoid harming, and to prevent their members from harming outsiders, even when those actions occur beyond the state’s territorial jurisdiction. Linklater argues that the harm principle is sufficiently thin, and yet sufficiently substantive, to provide the basis for a cosmopolitan ethic that can aspire to accommodate the concerns of those who would defend a measure of community self-​determination at the same time as acknowledging obligations to humanity.26 One distinct advantage of Linklater’s approach is that it 24. Brown, “Bringing the State,” 54. 25.  Andrew Linklater, “The Harm Principle and Global Ethics,” Global Society 20(2005):  329–​ 43; Andrew Linklater, “Cosmopolitan Political Communities in International Relations,” International Relations 16(2002):  135–​50. See also Richard Shapcott, “Anti-​Cosmopolitanism, Pluralism, and the Cosmopolitan Harm Principle,” Review of International Studies 34(2008): 185–​205. 26. Indeed, most “communitarian” writers, to varying degrees, accept this position as well. Where cosmopolitans and writers such as Walzer and Miller differ is in the extent and content of duties to outsiders. Walzer and Miller both accept not only natural duties, but also some account of universal human rights with corresponding responsibilities. In addition, there is some broad acceptance of a universal harm principle. For a more extended discussion of this point, see Richard Shapcott, International Ethics: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010). [ 86 ]  Richard Shapcott

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addresses state practice beyond its own territorial jurisdiction. The harm principle is addressed first to negative duties to refrain from harming others. According to Linklater, cosmopolitan political communities, or responsible cosmopolitan states, are communities who recognize the limits on their capacity to harm outsiders and who develop measures to limit and or redress harms done to them. Thus, Linklater argues that an “ethical foreign policy based on the ‘no harm’ principle is one way in which communities can reconcile their duties to fellow citizens and their obligations to distant strangers.”27 Adopting a cosmopolitan harm principle provides a means whereby individual states can become more cosmopolitan even in the absence of a global cosmopolitan order. In sum, cosmopolitan morality does not necessarily have to equate with a transnational institutional or legal structure that overrides or replaces the social contract. Instead, it requires at the very least the recognition that the social contract does not exhaust the moral obligations of its members and offers some means for institutionalizing that recognition.

4.3 KANT AND REPUBLICANISM

The previous section identified the cosmopolitan harm principle as a viable basis for a cosmopolitan ethics balancing the rights of citizenship and national self-​determination with obligations to humanity via a recognition of the state’s negative duties. Two hundred years ago, the starting point for modern cosmopolitanism, Kant’s “On Perpetual Peace,”28 similarly identified states, and republican states in particular, as the building blocks of a cosmopolitan world order. This section suggests, in line with but also modifying Kant’s thinking on perpetual peace, that properly constituted republican states are amenable to modifying their domestic social contract to recognize negative obligations to outsiders. Kant recognized that states, especially republican states bound by the rule of law, are a unique forum in which individuals exercise autonomy and wherein a political community exercises self-​determination and distinguishes itself from others. However, Kant also identified the arrival of the republican constitution as a precondition to help bring a cosmopolitan world order into being. Kant’s account suggests that instead of seeking to reconstitute a global order in a way in which republican self-​determination is disregarded, reconstitution can extend from transformation at the domestic constitutional level. In

27. Linklater, “Cosmopolitan Political Communities,” 135. 28.  Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983).

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the Kantian account, as Kleingeld argues, change in the global order extends from change in the domestic order: [T]‌he internal improvement of political structures and processes within states will have positive effects for global justice. Because they (Kantians) view the ideal state as the embodiment of the political autonomy of citizens, they can claim that their political theory . . . actually represents a way of making individual political autonomy compatible with world citizenship.29

The journey to a cosmopolitan world order, therefore, requires states to reform themselves domestically as a precondition for, and a corequisite of, international reform. In some ways, the CLO and the global constitution seem like natural extensions of the Kantian idea of the pacific federation. However, such an interpretation would disregard the way in which the latter extends from the domestic republican constitutions of the member-​states. The pacific federation is not positioned over and above the domestic level, and nor is it seen as the proper source of domestic law. The global constitutionalist vision departs from the Kantian idea because it would appear to disregard the importance of political self-​determination adhering to republican states. It appears to entirely reverse the source of legitimacy from the self-​determining political community to the global CLO. Kant’s cosmopolitan constitution is a federation that gains its legitimacy from its members agreeing to exit the state of nature. According to Kant, states arbitrarily limit human autonomy by refusing to commit themselves to a cosmopolitan federal constitution and by remaining in a state of nature. In order to address the deficiencies of the Hobbesian and Grotian social contract account, Kant articulated a sort of “second stage” to the contract that eradicates the state of nature. In this stage, the domestic social contract is replicated via the state acting as a proxy or representative and entering into a contract with other states. In Kant’s account, the second-​stage contract has only a very limited constitution and contains only minimal rules regulating state conduct, extending only as far as a pacific federation guaranteeing peace and hospitality. This federation realizes a cosmopolitan duty whereby we enact a form of the categorical imperative to exit the state of nature. The international contract arrives at a far more limited set of rules, or minimal international constitution, than in the domestic sphere because Kant values the self-​determining capacities of properly constituted states. In Kant’s work, the republican principle of state restraint is externalized, turned outward, to cover its relations with outsiders and thus reconciles republicanism 29.  Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism:  The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 197. [ 88 ]  Richard Shapcott

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with cosmopolitan principles. Thus, in addition to the minimal global structure of the pacific federation, what is most significant in Kant’s account is that the republican state is an agent of cosmopolitanism (good societies stem from good constitutions), and thus the republican constitution creates good states that can aspire to right behavior. The international contract is between properly constituted, republican states. Kant’s concern is primarily with the eradication of warfare and the state of nature. He did not examine whether it was possible for the republican constitution to govern the state’s external relations and restrain the republican state unilaterally, i.e., in the absence of a pacific federation and the continuance of the state of nature. The next section argues that until such time as democratic cosmopolitan legislative bodies emerge, it is useful to identify further cosmopolitan responsibilities that might be immanent within the constitutions of republican states. It identifies unexplored possibilities for including cosmopolitan elements latent in the republican constitution that can constrain state behavior internationally in line with a cosmopolitan harm principle. This approach addresses a failing of much contemporary republican and cosmopolitan thinking by bringing attention to the state’s domestic accountability for actions beyond its borders.

4.4 REPUBLICANISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM: RECONSTITUTING THE REPUBLICAN SOCIAL CONTRACT

This section examines the possibilities for a cosmopolitan republican state extending from the republican principle of nondomination. Existing approaches to reconciling cosmopolitanism and republicanism ignore or underestimate the cosmopolitan potentialities of the republican constitution to restrain state action abroad. According to recent republican political theory, the most important harm inherent in states is that of domination. Philip Pettit in particular argues that the republican idea of freedom is that of nondomination, and the republican state is concerned with limiting its own capacities to arbitrarily dominate or interfere with citizens’ own interests.30 This notion of freedom emphasizes not mere noninterference, but also shared liberty (as nondomination). Freedom is understood as both freedom from domination, especially violence, and freedom as a shared practice. An important part of being a nondominating state is that “what touches all should be agreed by all,” i.e., popular participation in and consent of the governed. Republican nondomination suggests 30.  See Phillip Pettit, Republicanism:  A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).

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several things for the state, including that majoritarian rule is modified by the rights of individuals, by the rule of law, and the equal legal status of all members. The constitution enshrines these principles as a means of correcting the tendency toward domination inherent in states. The constitutional republican state is understood as having imposed restrictions upon its own capacity to dominate. Until recently, a correlate of republican theory has been an emphasis on the republican state as guarantor of the rights of citizens only. As Cecile Laborde notes, republicanism is usually understood as an account of associative duties; citizens and their states have duties only to their own members.31 Bohman also notes that the republican constitution protects only the citizens of the republic and does not necessarily extend that protection to visitors, or resident foreigners, or those beyond the republic’s borders.32 Thus, it appears that republican theory has turned away from Kant and, implicitly at least, supports the internal conception of obligation and the distinction between humans and citizens that was rejected in “On Perpetual Peace.”33 The last decade or so has seen the emergence of a long delayed return to interest in questions of republicanism in an age of globalization and interdependence.34 Recent scholarship has acknowledged that a focus on the internal capacity for domination is insufficient in an age in which states and other actors have a capacity to dominate each other and each other’s citizens at a distance.35 According to Bohman, the republican argument has seemed to rest on the assumption that a state’s only capacities for domination are those that affect individuals domestically; however, “in a world of extensive social, economic, and political interaction across borders, citizens may come to be dominated by distant others with whom they are not in an extant political community.”36 According to Laborde, at least, this recognition aligns with the cosmopolitan harm principle, that our primary duty not to harm others “tallies with the republican view . . . and insofar as our dominating others can 31. Cecile Laborde, “Republicanism and Global Justice: A Sketch,” European Journal of Political Theory 9(2010):  48–​69, at 48; see Bohman, Democracy Across Borders; James Bohman, “Republican Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 12(2004): 336–​52. 32. James Bohman, “Living Without Freedom: Cosmopolitanism at Home and the Rule of Law,” Political Theory 37(2009): 539–​61. 33. The recent republican turn is referred to as “neo-​Roman” because it harks back to pre-​Kantian, Ciceronian accounts of freedom. 34.  See Phillip Pettit, “A Republican Law of Peoples,” European Journal of Political Theory 9(2010):  70–​94; Phillip Pettit, Just Freedom:  A Moral Compass for a Complex World (New York: Norton, 2014). 35.  Barbara Buckinx, “Domination in Global Politics:  Reflections on Freedom and an Argument for Incremental Global Change,” in Luis Cabrera, ed., Global Governance, Global Government:  Institutional Visions for an Evolving World System (Albany:  State University of New York Press, 2011), 253–​82. 36. Bohman, “Living Without Freedom,” 550. [ 90 ]  Richard Shapcott

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be shown to constitute a clear form of harm . . . , then we have a duty not to dominate others.”37 Thus, some republicans now accept that the concern for nondomination is a universal, not a particularistic one. This in turn suggests the cosmopolitan conclusion that the social contract should include the recognition of a duty not to harm or dominate those not included in it directly. This republican concern with domination globally and internationally has taken a number of forms. Several have argued that globalization requires a departure from the minimal federation of Kant and instead have sought to identify how republican principles can be extended to cover international and transnational institutions, publics, and agents.38 These arguments have sought to identify ways to transform the global order, or elements of it, along republican lines; that is, to insert republican principles into the realms of global governance and international legal and political orders, or to identify the precursors and equivalents of a global republican civil society. In one sense, this literature seeks to expand the principles of republicanism beyond the nation-​state, while it also implies a global republican order above or interpenetrating more local or national forms of governance. Thus, these accounts bear many resemblances to the logic of cosmopolitanism feared by Miller. Even while seeking to expand the range of nondomination, they do so by means of transnational mechanisms cutting across and through states. There is neither the space nor the necessity to engage with all these responses in depth here. It is sufficient to note that nothing that follows is necessarily inconsistent with this move. Many of these approaches are concerned with either the global or international application of republican thought, rather than with investigating how individual states can become unilaterally more nondominating in their external relations. In contrast, and responding to this tendency toward global governance solutions, Phillip Pettit has made the case for a republican “law of peoples” that is much closer in spirit to Kant’s vision. Pettit claims that the republican state can avoid the domination of outsiders by entering into stable, law-​governed relations with other political communities, i.e., abiding by international law, of which they are the coauthors, and recognizing each other’s legitimate rights of existence. Like Kant, Pettit seeks to maintain the republican state as the building block of an interstate order.39 Nondomination consists of a duty to recognize other nondominating states. Insofar as foreigners are citizens of 37. Laborde, “Republicanism and Global Justice,” 60. 38.  Steven Slaughter, “Reconsidering the State:  Cosmopolitanism, Republicanism, and Global Governance,” in Stan van Hooft and Wim Vandekerckhove, eds., Questioning Cosmopolitanism (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2010), 183–​98; Steven Slaughter, Liberty Beyond Neo-​liberalism: A Republican Critique of Liberal Governance in a Globalising Age (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2005). 39. Pettit, “A Republican Law of Peoples,” 70; see also John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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nondominating states, their freedom is assured by that state internally and externally. Crucial to Pettit’s argument is the insight that a nondominating state is necessary for the protection of its citizens from external domination as well. He argues that a free state, one in which its citizens are not dominated, is one in which agents are not controlled “in an alien way by others; [and requires] the presence of resources in virtue of which the agent has the status of an independent subject.”40 A  republican state, to realize its freedom, must not be dominated externally: “In not dominating their own citizens . . . representative states will pass on one count as free states. But in not being dominated by other’s states or other international bodies . . . they will pass as free states on a second count too.”41 This in turn requires republican states to enter into lawlike relations with other states—​laws of which they are all the authors—​ whereby they establish nondominating relations between each other. Unlike most recent republican accounts of global governance, Pettit’s solution is comparatively state centric. It does not envision the replacement of the republican state with a global authority and continues to see the autonomous republic as the basic political unit for self-​determination and the realization of freedom. Pettit’s account attempts to solve the problem of how a republican state can be guaranteed of its own nondomination by outsiders, but also not dominate outsiders, by legislating for them without their consent or participation. Support for others’ republican self-​determination partly overcomes the problem that outsiders are still susceptible to domination by not being able to participate in the writing of the constitution of a foreign state. Recognizing the political forms of other’s self-​determination addresses the republican concern with domination via nonparticipation. Pettit concedes that republican self-​determination is ultimately justifiable only in broadly cosmopolitan terms because “[t]‌he exclusiveness of one contract is justifiable only on the basis of respect for others contracts—​or to put it differently, for others’ self-​determining capacity as a parallel to our own.”42 It is not cosmopolitan in the “thick” or “strong” sense, but only in the “thin” or “weak” sense, in that it involves a commitment to everyone’s right of self-​ determination and not to be dominated. However, Pettit’s solution remains insufficient for a number of reasons. First, it appears to be somewhat complacent about the willingness and ability of republican states to agree on laws that are not dominating or the expression of power rather than law. In the domestic republican state, individuals are the makers of the law and thus free from domination. Their freedom is 40. Pettit, “A Republican Law of Peoples,” 88. 41. Ibid., 88. 42. Ibid., 68. [ 92 ]  Richard Shapcott

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assured by domestic legal mechanisms and the recognition of the authority of the nondominating state to coerce in order to restrain. In the international sphere, either in current law or in Pettit’s account, there is no neutral arbiter or accepted authority. Thus, states are not dominated because they make the international law. However, they have not established any means equivalent to domestic constitutional protections to correct for the disparities of power between themselves that may lead powerful states to dominate others. Pettit’s solution provides no mechanism to prevent his law of peoples from becoming a modus vivendi rather than a genuinely nondominating relationship.43 Among the dangers of Pettit’s solution is that it looks alarmingly like the status quo, in which, as Laborde notes, there is an incentive structure in favor of domination. “Dominant actors have a clear interest in ensuring that . . . coercive relationships are not regulated or subjected to scrutiny.”44 In the current order, individual states and the institutions of global governance both treat dominating states as legitimate partners, but they also benefit from their domination. For instance, as Leif Wenar argues, wealthy republican states participate in and benefit from the domination of foreign peoples by participating in the trade in “stolen” natural resources.45 They therefore have an incentive for the maintenance of these relations of domination. To be sure, Pettit acknowledges that his solution provides no constitutional guarantees against domination, and that international deliberation, international law, and strategic alliances provide only quasi-​and weak elements of restraint on states. The most powerful states “may have too much influence to be capable of being fully restrained by international agencies”46 and will be more resistant to the deliberative practices associated with them and international law. To counter this, he sees the only solution as lying in the formation of counterbalancing alliances and strategic partnerships among the weak. This is because [s]‌tates will relate to one another in a truly deliberative mode, eschewing all resort to alien control, only in the measure that they respect one another. And states will respect one another only in the measure that they command one

43.  To be sure, Pettit’s republican theory is an ideal type, and not a reflection on current practice, but ideal types ought also to be able to address likely consequences of their hypothetical applications. Thus, even if the world were constituted by ideal typical republican states, they would still have disparities of wealth and power and not be restrained by a central impartial institution. 44. Laborde, “Republicanism and Global Justice,” 59. 45. Leif Wenar, “Property Rights and the Resource Curse,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 36(2008): 2–​32. 46. Pettit, “A Republican Law of Peoples,” 84.

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another’s respect; they each have enough power to leave others no choice but to respect them.47

Thus, like classical international relations (IR) theorists, he sees the source of restraint, of nondomination, in balancing in the international realm, and does not look for possible domestic sources for restraining states’ actions abroad. However, republican theory suggests that domination includes not just the writing of rules on which others have no input, i.e., political domination, but the more mundane harms and interferences that states can inflict on individuals and communities, including arbitrary acts of violence, violation of human rights, and systemic poverty. Laborde notes: Domination refers to the relatively unrestrained and systematic (even if unexercised) ability of a group or individuals to exert power over others in pursuit of their own interests at the expense of those subordinate to them. Domination—​ in Philip Pettit’s terms, the capacity arbitrarily to interfere in the affairs of others—​is rooted in structural inequalities of power, and manifests itself in the denial of basic interests of the dominated.48

Thus, dominant states have, under conditions not dissimilar to what Pettit suggests, established a world order that suits their interests and is in some sense imposed upon the rest of the world. This is most visibly the case in terms of what Laborde calls the “Pogge hypothesis,” that the rich states and counterpart elites impose an unjust economic order upon the poor.49 The international economic order, therefore, is “a (structurally unfair) systemic order which authorizes and aggravates the pre-​institutional subservience and dependency of weak states.”50 That is an order in which the powerful dominate the weak and the institutions of international order not only do not restrain, but actually enable that domination. This suggests that republican nondomination requires more from the state than simply a recognition of other republics and agreements to regulate relations. For republicans like Pettit, the problem of outsiders is that by virtue of their exclusion from the polity, they are unable to participate in making the rules of that polity. They are, therefore, capable of being dominated by it. The paradox is that republican states cannot unilaterally pass laws that restrain their own actions, i.e., that seek to prevent domination, or at least interference in relation to outsiders) without, in Pettit’s terms, dominating them. This

47. Ibid. 48. Laborde, “Republicanism and Global Justice,” 54. 49.  Thomas Pogge, “World Poverty and Human Rights,” Ethics and International Affairs 19(2005): 1–​7. 50. Laborde, “Republicanism and Global Justice,” 57. [ 94 ]  Richard Shapcott

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is because, by virtue of being outsiders, they cannot be the authors of those rules. This becomes obvious in the area of migration. All states routinely dominate others through enacting unilateral prohibitions on entry. Those seeking to enter a state are subject to rules that they have not participated in making nor consented to. Pettit’s republican law of peoples would seem to only assure nondomination as long as people do not seek to move between polities, because any such movement would expose individuals to domination as they become subject to their desired new states’ rules regarding entry. Pettit’s solution is to safely place outsiders in their own nondominating states and to keep them there. However, in both theory and practice, this seems to be a necessary but not sufficient protection against domination. Pettit’s solution does not therefore adequately resolve this tension. Finally, Pettit’s solution cannot adequately address the responsibilities to individuals who are not protected by their own state, including stateless people or people in weak or nonrepublican states. It also suggests that republican states cannot be nondominating, or at least less dominating, in the absence of a law of peoples or republican global legal order. It therefore defers individual state responsibility to the law of peoples, rather than investigating how individual republican states may be more responsible for their dominating or harming acts abroad. Even good republican states can be dominators abroad because of the lack of domestic law governing those activities. States participate in practices internationally that are not restrained by their domestic constitutions. Thus, republican constitutions often permit, or at least do not prevent, domination abroad.51 In other words, the international incentives are reinforced by domestic ones.52 It therefore cannot be inconceivable that a nondominating state could seek to extend constitutional protections to noncitizens beyond its territory. In order to practice nondomination, or at least to restrict a state’s harmful acts abroad and to outsiders, it is conceivable that constitutional provisions designed to restrain the state can be extended to those who are not colegislators without dominating them. Perhaps in light of the two hundred years of republican states that have passed since Kant, we are more circumspect in our assessment of the 51. Kal Raustiala, Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 52. One of the assumptions of Pettit’s work is that it does not need to address the domestic conditions within representative states, only the relations between them, because “in representative states, there will normally be effective legal and political means of contestation and correction available within those countries themselves.” However, what Pettit does not address is the fact that in almost all such states, such provisions do not apply to nonresidents, and in some cases not to resident foreigners either. Even most contemporary international human rights law covers only state responsibilities to uphold human rights domestically, i.e. within their own territory. See Pettit, “A Republican Law of Peoples,” 72.

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republican impact on international affairs. As the problems outlined here suggest, republican states do not automatically engender a pacific federation. The contemporary practices of republican states tell us that simply having an in-​principle reason for recognizing other states’ autonomy, and even for entering into cooperative international institutions, is insufficient protection against domination. The question that the remainder of this chapter raises is whether further guarantees of external nondomination, in line with a cosmopolitan harm principle, can be written into the constitutions of republican states.

4.5 THE COSMOPOLITAN CONSTITUTION

The national constitution is the legal institutional expression of the basic terms of republican social contract. It sets out the duties and rights of members and of their representative and governing bodies. Constitutions are generally seen as the prerogative of domestic populations and an expression of national and republican values. Constitutions perform two major functions. The first is to restrain and set limits on a state’s right to harm its citizens—​the garantiste53 function of restricting the arbitrary power of the state (nondomination). The second is to set out the rules by which a state is constituted and governed, including the purposes of, and relationships between, the different organs of government and the legal system. In addition to the idea of popular rule, neo-​Roman republican thought emphasizes garantiste provisions restricting the state’s capacity to practice domination. Thus, democratic and republican constitutions usually embody some means for checking state powers in relation to citizens; this includes, among other things, bills of rights and avenues of appeal for citizens to seek to hold their states accountable to their constitutions. As previously noted, republican states have self-​limiting constitutions that guarantee the rights and legal standing of their citizens and constrain the state’s capacity for domination by subjecting it to the rule of law. James Bohman argues, drawing on Pettit: [T]‌he rule of law is not merely instrumental to bringing about some antecedently present form of freedom, but is in part constitutive of it as political freedom, a status that can be had in no other way than through the laws shared by a community.  .  .  . non-​domination is achieved not through threats or coercion, but “by introducing constitutional authority” that is so organized that it cannot itself become a dominator. These institutional conditions “will not just inhibit 53.  Giovanni Sartori, “Constitutionalism:  A Preliminary Discussion,” American Political Science Review, 56(1962): 853–​64. [ 96 ]  Richard Shapcott

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domination, but bring it to an end.” This authority of a “non-​dominating interferer” is thus constitutive of freedom’.54

For Bohman, “republicans see the rule of law constitutively, as establishing a ‘civil condition’ in which everyone has at least one fundamental status, the status of being a citizen.”55 Republican constitutions also include consultative measures to assure the accountability of the state to its populace. These might include means for legal redress for harms committed by the state, as well as mechanisms for guaranteeing the state will uphold its positive duties to its population. Such provisions work to ensure that states cannot arbitrarily, without judicial accountability, override the rights of their citizens, i.e. their status as persons. In sum, the creation of the res publica requires a constitution that creates the realm of freedom from arbitrary domination, a community of self-​legislators who nonetheless abide by the rule of law. Traditionally, because extraterritorial affairs were beyond the jurisdiction of the state and its citizens, and by definition, outsiders were not party to the contract, there was no pressing reason for extending constitutional provision of nondomination to those outside. Few republican states and few republican theorists make provision to extend the garantiste functions to outsiders who may have their rights and freedoms injured by the state or its members. As Richard Vernon argues, states “impose constraints on the freedom of outsiders  .  .  .  and also make them vulnerable to external effects, without extending to them the political and legal protection that co-​citizens get.”56 Bohman has argued that if republicanism is interpreted in cosmopolitan terms, and if it is embedded in a cosmopolitan universalist account of freedom rather than a communitarian or contractual one, then this restriction of constitutional protection to citizens only is unjustifiable. According to Bohman, republicanism maintains that domination of persons qua persons is wrong, and therefore the state has a duty of nondomination in relation to all persons in “answer to the question of whose freedom is important in assessing a just legal order. The only possible answer consistent with nondomination is ‘all persons.’ ”57 For instance, resident foreigners can be subjects of domestic law 54. According to Bohman, the “central aim of the rule of law is to avoid arbitrary rule. Law imposes fundamental constraints on the exercise of power, including generality, publicity, and nonretroactivity.” Bohman, “Living Without Freedom,” 542. 55. Ibid., 540. 56.  Richard Vernon, Cosmopolitan Regard:  Political Membership and Global Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 191. 57. Central to Bohman’s account is a universalist claim that the “personhood” in republican constitutions is not restricted to citizens of a political community. Bohman distinguishes his account from the more well known one of Pettit by appealing to a Kantian account of “originary freedom,” that is, freedom (nondomination) as a right of all persons, and not just those party to the social contract. Bohman, “Living Without Freedom,”543.

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of a foreign state without being counted as legal agents, and therefore, they are unfree and the state is acting in a dominating fashion toward them. Bohman argues that republican guarantees of freedom and rule of law apply to noncitizen residents, temporary residents, migrants, undocumented residents, asylum seekers, refugees, and others who may inhabit the territory but not be members of the republic: “Without this (universal) scope, the right to freedom would be distributed according to the contingencies of membership or on the entirely counterfactual assumption that all residents of any polity also have the status of citizens. But this empirical assumption clearly no longer holds, if it ever has.”58 He concludes, “The only way to realize non-​ domination  .  .  .  is to incorporate a shared and universal status for all legal subjects into the rule of law. Only when all subjects of the law are also legal persons before the law does the right to freedom apply universally to all persons. Call those provisions that express this universal legal status of persons the ‘cosmopolitan constitution.’ ”59 In other words, if constitutions do not grant legal standing to everybody affected by the state, including the rights to due process, to legal redress, and to legal standing in the courts, though not necessarily the full panoply of citizenship rights, then that state is a dominating one. Bohman, like cosmopolitans such as Benhabib, is concerned with how the republican state treats outsiders once they have entered the state’s territory. However, if he is right and republican states are concerned with the freedom of all persons, i.e. that the claim of freedom is a universal one, then it also should follow that the state has a duty of extraterritorial nondomination. From a cosmopolitan perspective, republican states arbitrarily limit the legal standing and rights of nonmembers. Nonmembers both inside and outside the republic’s territory have only limited legal standing as persons, if they have any at all. Most extant constitutions do not impose the same restrictions upon their state and citizens abroad as they do domestically. The garantiste function of the constitution is largely reserved for activities at home. This overlooks the fact that insofar as a state conducts a foreign policy that affects the members of other countries, there is potential for domination. Especially insofar as that foreign policy is held to be nonjudiciable, i.e., not subject to the rule of law, scrutiny by the courts, or accountability to domestic law, or binding enforceable equivalent international law, then that potential for domination exists. These harms of domination are constitutional, in that they extend from the constitutions of states as bounded communities and from their sovereign territoriality. It follows that further constitutional guarantees and restraints that go beyond the recognition of other’s political communities are needed. It also 58. Ibid., 545. 59. Ibid., 547. [ 98 ]  Richard Shapcott

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follows that a cosmopolitan constitution should extend the garantiste provision to outsiders, i.e., accept restrictions on its right to inflict arbitrary harm, and that it should include legal recognition of the rights of outsiders, including the extension of rule of law to foreign policy. In other words, the republican state is required to fashion a way to ensure its nondomination of other’s states and individuals beyond its borders, i.e., to write the form of nondomination in relation to those beyond its borders into its constitution. Accordingly, the republican state has at the minimum a duty to act in accordance with the rule of law in relation to nonresidents and foreigners beyond its borders. In this way, it can recognize their status as persons (humans) without granting them citizenship. States that do not extend the garantiste provisions of their constitutions to outsiders cannot be considered to be nondominating.

4.6 EXTENDING THE GARANTISTE FUNCTION OF THE RULE OF LAW

As noted previously, there are many ways in which states and their citizens can harm or dominate those beyond their borders, some of these are occasional and some systemic and hard to allocate responsibility for. How states can be made constitutionality accountable for their acts abroad is a daunting task.60 However, as indicated, there are already elements of cosmopolitanism within republican constitutions that could be developed further or extended. Proper analysis of the exact legal forms required to realize cosmopolitan state responsibility requires more space than is available here. The aim instead has been to set the scene for such investigations. Nonetheless, at the very least, it can be suggested that nondomination requires of the state the following in its external affairs:  cosmopolitan extraterritoriality, including rule of law, due process, and human rights; recognition of other’s republican self-​determination (including restrictions upon the use of force); and the development of institutional means for adequate consultation and redress for outsiders. This section will first briefly explore the idea of cosmopolitan extraterritoriality as an extension of the garantiste provisions of republican constitutions before closing with some reflections on the possibilities for institutional redress and consultation. Cosmopolitan extraterritoriality is the extension of the state’s jurisdiction over its own citizens and other agents, including corporations and the state

60. The discussion here focusses on cases of domination where specific states dominate other states or individuals. Laura Valentini’s notion of systemic coercion provides another focus for republican attention where unilateral constitutional change may be insufficient; see Laura Valentini, Justice in a Globalized World: A Normative Framework (Oxford University Press, 2011).

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itself, when acting beyond its territory. Reformulated along cosmopolitan lines, this principle makes these agents legally accountable, in their country of origin, for their actions abroad. Cosmopolitan extraterritoriality ensures that states are constrained by the rule of law in their foreign policy. A cosmopolitan clause in the constitution in matters of, for instance, national security, and the conduct (but not the direction) of foreign policy might state that they must be undertaken within the limits of the law, and that executive is not excused from judicial review.61 A simple cosmopolitan law recognizing the extraterritorial jurisdiction of certain aspects of domestic criminal and human rights law would function to restrain the state and its citizens intending to do harm abroad.62 Many states commit to upholding human rights domestically, either through domestic legislation or through international treaties. However, many states do not take this to mean they are similarly required to respect rights in their actions abroad. Recognizing the extraterritorial scope of human rights obligations is thus a component of the cosmopolitan constitution.63 In addition to the rule of law provisions, there is the possibility that states adopt forms of cosmopolitan extraterritoriality whereby they can extend the criminal liability of their own citizens and corporations for their actions abroad.64 Such provisions already exist in several states in relation to sex tourism, war crimes, international humanitarian law, and crimes against humanity.65 A more ambitious proposal, but in keeping with the republican all-​ affected principle, would be to incorporate means for including the interests

61. This is distinct from arguing that the judiciary should have oversight on foreign policy, and it is not a challenge to the separation of powers doctrine. It merely seeks to maintain and develop existing restrictions on the state’s capacity to commit arbitrary harm by extending them to noncitizens and to its acts abroad. Thus, it affects only the acts pursuant to foreign policy, but not that policy itself, which remains part of the political process. See Jeffrey Davis, Justice Across Borders: The Struggle for Human Rights in US Courts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For a definitive study of this issue in the context of the United States and Germany, see Thomas M. Franck, Political Questions/​Judicial Answers:  Does the Rule of Law Apply to Foreign Affairs? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 62. For further discussion of this topic, see the chapters by Richard Shapcott, Melissa Curley, and Danielle Ireland-​Piper in Richard Beardsworth, Garrett Wallace Brown, and Richard Shapcott, eds., The State and Cosmopolitan Responsibilities (forthcoming, Oxford: Oxford University Press) 63. Sigrun I. Skogly, “Extraterritoriality: Universal Human Rights Without Universal Obligations?” in J. Sarah and A. McBeth, eds., Research Handbook on International Human Rights Law (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2010). 64.  . See Jahn De Baere and Gaert De Baere, “European Integration and the Rule of Law in Foreign Policy,” in J. Dickson and P. Eleftheriadis, Philosophical Foundations of European Union Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 65. See the discussion in Richard Shapcott, “From the Good International Citizen to the Cosmopolitan Political Community:  A Constitutional Path,” International Politics 50(2013): 138–​57. [ 100 ]  Richard Shapcott

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of outsiders in the state’s deliberations of matters that may affect them. As Vernon argues, “The general duty not to harm . . . flows into a further duty to take institutional steps to discover what it is that one is doing from the standpoint of those to whom one is doing it.”66 Cosmopolitan states have positive duties to consider the interest of nonmembers, and positive duties to allow nonmembers a form of legal standing to allow redress and recourse to the legal system in cases of harm. Such a right might entail only one positive duty, to allow outsiders the opportunity for legal redress, which in turn requires granting them legal status as persons. Granting outsiders a legal status as persons requires at a minimum that the state’s actions toward them be subject to the rule of law. It provides the basis upon which they may be able to access legal means of appeal and redress. In turn, this works to limit the arbitrariness of a state’s actions in relations to outsiders and increases its legitimacy at home and abroad. Both of these mechanisms suggest that the responsible cosmopolitan state respects the rights of persons at home and abroad and modifies its conduct so as not to harm, or dominate, outsiders. That is, it includes some sort of consultative or deliberative means whereby it can achieve “representation, through which people importantly affected at a distance can have their interests and needs taken seriously into account in these decisions.”67 These could be with through its own or multilateral institutions. However, such mechanisms can only proceed after the state has recognized the legal status of all humans, and not just their own citizens, as persons.

4.7 CONCLUSION

The adoption of republican constitutions that limit the freedom of the state in relationship to its own population was a revolutionary step in human freedom and the evolution of modern political communities. Contemporary conditions of enhanced interdependence or cosmopolitan risk society suggest that this development needs to be extended to those beyond the state who may be subject to its domination. These conditions suggest the need for states to extend their republican accountability to outsiders by rewriting some of the clauses of their domestic social contract. In particular, cosmopolitanism requires a constitutional transformation that includes the interests of outsiders. Cosmopolitan responsibility requires states to extend their legal instruments to include the interests of nonmembers of the social contract. The domestic constitution is the means for doing this. 66. Vernon, Cosmopolitan Regard, 188. 67. Carol C. Gould, “Self-​Determination Beyond Sovereignty: Relating Transnational Democracy to Local Autonomy,” Journal of Social Philosophy, 37(2006): 44–​60, at 54–​55.

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Thus, in a partial answer to Brown’s call to identify the components of a responsible cosmopolitan state, this chapter has identified it as one that unilaterally recognizes its negative obligations to other states and their citizens and adopts revisions to its domestic constitution that require external acts to be subject to the rule of law and give some legal standing to outsiders. A responsible cosmopolitan state is one that imposes limits upon its capacity to dominate outsiders while preserving the benefits of citizenship for insiders, even in a state of nature. While the decades since the signing of the UN Charter have seen the widespread acceptance of minimal cosmopolitan duties, including limitations on states’ capacity to commit harms to their own population, and some states have agreed to limit harms that they or their members may commit to outsiders, such as in “sex tourism” and participation in war crimes, most states remain less constrained by cosmopolitan norms in their actions abroad than in domestic ones. However, despite these developments, the tension between “human” and “citizen” endures to this day; and in most places, citizenship clearly triumphs over humanity. From a cosmopolitan perspective, meaningful transformations of the international realm favoring obligations to humanity will require either the transcendence of the international order or more robust commitments to restrain the freedom to harm of individual states than is currently the case. Every state has the capacity to constrain its own actions abroad, with or without external demands to do so. From this insight, we can overcome the charge that cosmopolitanism necessarily leads to a “strong” form of world government. Thus, while the argument given here is addressed to republican states, it could, in principle, apply to any constitutionally governed state. The aim of this chapter has been to identify resources within the republican state’s own discourses and modes of legitimation that can be used to further develop cosmopolitan goals. Thus, the conclusion is not that republican political theory necessarily leads to the duty of external nondomination, but that it can be made consistent with such duties. The argument, thus, is a moral argument for institutional reform that is not inconsistent with existing principles of republican government and self-​determination, especially in the context of the possibility for “domination at a distance.” The arguments presented here clearly require further elaboration beyond the scope of this chapter. As noted previously, the issues raised are preliminary investigations only. It is possible that more questions have been raised than answered. Therefore, a few things need to be said by way of qualification and clarification. Having established a case for looking to the state constitution as a source of transformation, a more explicitly praxeological investigation becomes possible. The next stage of enquiry, beyond the scope of this chapter, is to attend to the specific transformations of domestic law that may follow from the argument given previously. [ 102 ]  Richard Shapcott

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Nothing in the preceding argument is meant to refute or reject transnational formulations of cosmopolitanism. It is likely that developments suggested here may have something of a dialectic relationship with cosmopolitan international law and institutions. However, the intention has been to shine a light onto a neglected possibility for cosmopolitan transformation. Thus, the types of changes suggested here can have their origins either in transnational law, international human rights law, or transnational advocacy networks, or alternatively, they may stem from or be immanent within a state’s domestic political discourse. States which have adopted the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or which have their own bills of rights, such as the United States, already have the necessary resources to be able to further extend the protections to outsiders. The central point is that a law may have a cosmopolitan scope without having a cosmopolitan “source,” such as in the case of universal jurisdiction. The same applies to the question of motivation: what would motivate states to adopt such measures? To be sure, it is unlikely to occur without external feedback or pressure, be it from citizens of other states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or other individual states. What will ultimately be required is an awareness on the part of the domestic constituency that their state can no longer be seen as acting in isolation and their social contract affects others, and that at the very least, it may be in their own self-​interest to acknowledge this. Such an awareness requires a process of political education of domestic populations implying, as Ypi argues,68 that cosmopolitanism requires both popular sovereignty and civic education of the population. There are many advantages of turning to this approach. Primarily, it addresses the issue of the state directly by asking how state practices can be rethought without requiring any necessary prior major transformation of the international order as a whole. It asks only what individual states can do in order to be more cosmopolitan under conditions of globalization and interdependence. As with any argument for institutional change, much of what has been suggested here could be seen as impractical as proposals for global democracy. However, while making such changes may remain politically difficult at this time, simply asking a state to incorporate the rights of outsiders in the ways suggested in this chapter is less demanding and therefore, prima facie, more practical than asking that state to surrender its sovereignty or reconstitute itself in a transnational institutional structure. Of course, the latter is not impossible (witness the European Union); but even the European Union suffers from a democratic deficit that limits its legitimacy in the eyes of those

68. Ypi, “Statist Cosmopolitanism.”

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subject to it. Therefore, there is at least as much merit in attending to possible domestic transformations as to international. Thus, while cosmopolitan norms may or may not be derived from an existing transnational legal framework, such as human rights treaties, there is nothing in principle to prevent an individual state from acknowledging responsibilities to outsiders unilaterally, i.e., in the absence of, or supplementary to, transnational agreements. In this way, individual political communities can work toward a greater acknowledgment of their citizens’ obligations to each other and to humanity.

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II

Global Governance Institutions Cosmopolitan Assessments and Reforms

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CHAPTER 5

Global Governance Procedures, Outcomes, and Justice SIMON C ANEY

5.1 INTRODUCTION

Much contemporary political theory takes the state as a given. In many cases, people move from the claim that a certain ideal or goal is required by justice to the conclusion that the “state” (or, more accurately, the “government”) ought to implement it. But the modern state is a very particular kind of political institution. It has not been a permanent feature of the world. For long periods of time, and, in many parts of the world, the state—​or at least the state as we now know it—​has not existed. Many states date their rise to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. As numerous scholars have brought out, political power has historically taken many different forms.1 We should not then simply assume that a system of states is the only option; and we have reason to consider others to see whether they are better or worse. To do so, and to see how we might have other kinds of political order, it is useful to start with a definition of the state. By doing this, one can identify and make explicit the core features of the state, and then one can see ways in which, by varying these features, other kinds of political order are possible. In what follows, I adopt Max Weber’s well-​known characterization of the state. In his discussion of the state in “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” Weber writes that 1. See Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), especially ch. 3; Christopher W. Morris, An Essay on the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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a state is that human community which (successfully) lays claims to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory, this “territory” being another of the defining characteristics of the state. For the specific feature of the present is that the right to use physical violence is attributed to any and all other associations or individuals only to the extent that the state for its part permits this to happen. The state is held to be the sole source of the “right” to use violence.2

Thus defined, the state has three core features:  territoriality, supremacy, and comprehensiveness.3 Consider each in turn. First, the jurisdiction of a sovereign state is defined in territorial terms. Power is exercised over a territory. This, of course, is not the only way that jurisdiction might be determined. The Catholic Church, for example, exercised authority over people, and its jurisdiction was not territorially defined.4 The same was true of the Holy Roman Empire.5 Some have proposed functional approaches, where jurisdiction for a given political organization is defined by what is required for it to perform its function,6 and have queried the need for territoriality.7 Second, the state claims final or ultimate authority. It is the highest authority within the territory, and also outside it.8 Given this, one might call for systems in which no one actor or institution has final authority. Third, and finally, states lay claim to supreme authority over all functions:9 what Daniel Philpott calls “absoluteness.”10 We could thus have other kinds of political order, in which some political institutions have final authority over some functions, other political institutions have final authority over other

2. Max Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” in Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, eds., Weber:  Political Writings (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994 [1919]), 309–​69. 3.  Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders:  A Global Political Theory (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005), 149–​52, and the references cited therein. For a similar account (which emphasizes the same features that I  do), see Daniel Philpott’s excellent succinct analysis in Revolutions in Sovereignty:  How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relationships (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 16–​19; see also Quentin Skinner’s historical analysis of the evolution of the concept of the modern state, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” Proceedings of the British Academy 162(2009): 325–​70. 4. Spruyt, The Sovereign State, 42–​51. 5. Ibid., 51–​55. 6. David Mitrany, The Progress of International Government (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933); David Mitrany, “The Functional Approach to World Organization,” International Affairs 24(1948): 350–​63. 7. Bruno S. Frey, “A Utopia? Government Without Territorial Monopoly,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft) 157(2001):162–​65. 8. Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, 149–​50. 9. Ibid., 150. 10. Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty, 18–​19. [ 108 ] Simon Caney

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functions, and none enjoys final authority over others for all functions. This would be a nonstatist kind of order. The possibility of different kinds of political structures invites the question of which of these are best, and on what grounds. In this chapter, I examine this issue. I analyze two principles that many think should guide institutional design, and I focus, in particular, on their implications for global institutional design; that is, for the ways in which power and authority should be distributed at the global level. Both principles, I submit, have considerable appeal. However, it is not obvious how the two relate—​whether they conflict, are consistent, or are mutually supporting. My aim here is to examine the relationship between these two principles. To do so, I begin in section 5.2 by introducing the two principles of global institutional design—​what I  shall term the “instrumental” and “procedural” principles. Section 5.3 then notes various ways in which they might conflict. The bulk of the rest of the chapter then seeks to show how the two ideals may be reconciled in theory and practice. I defend the reconciliatory view that the two ideals are (at the global level) compatible with each other or can be rendered compatible. I do so by advancing three different theses in sections 5.4–​5.6. Endorsing both values thus need not force on us a choice between the two. I then close by noting that the two are not merely compatible: they also can be mutually supportive (in section 5.7).

5.2 TWO NORMATIVE IDEALS

Let us begin, then, by introducing the two kinds of principle. Consider, first, what has been termed an “instrumental” approach to global institutional design.11 This approach evaluates political institutions (including, in this case, the organization of political power at the global level) in terms of how well they promote certain states of affairs. If we conjoin this with a cosmopolitan account of justice, then some will argue—​on empirical grounds—​that a system of states is unable to cope with certain kinds of problems and, for that reason it, needs to be transcended. Many, for example, have argued that it is ill equipped to deal with global problems, such as global poverty and inequality, as well as addressing climate change and biodiversity loss. I think that the empirical premise of this argument is plausible.12 11.  Charles R. Beitz, “Cosmopolitan Liberalism and the States System,” in Chris Brown, ed., Political Restructuring in Europe:  Ethical Perspectives (London:  Routledge, 1994), 119–​31, at 127ff. 12.  Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, 159–​60; Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice and Institutional Design:  An Egalitarian Liberal Conception of Global Governance,” Social Theory and Practice 32(2006): 725–​56, at 735–​50; Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights:  Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, 2nd ed. (Cambridge,

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Here, though, I wish to focus on the normative claim made by this argument. The instrumental approach to evaluating institutions that it presupposes has much to be said in its favor. If, for example, one adheres to a set of rights and affirms that people are entitled to engage in certain activities, then it would seem strange to say that the design of political institutions should be utterly indifferent to such considerations. The instrumental approach is, however, not the only intuitively plausible way of thinking about these issues. A second kind of argument is more procedural in nature. Roughly stated, this makes the following kind of claim: [T]‌hose who are involuntarily and profoundly affected by socio-​economic forces are entitled to participate (or be represented) in the political process governing those socio-​economic forces.13

This procedural thought has been developed in a number of different ways. One can distinguish between at least two different variations of this core claim—​what I shall term the “affectedness” version14 and the “subject to the law” version.15 Roughly stated, the “affectedness” version maintains that those who are affected in a certain kind of way are entitled to some kind of participation or representation, whereas the “subject to the law” version maintains that those who are governed by a political system (they are subject UK: Polity Press, 2008), especially 187–​90. On instrumental approaches to global institutional design, see also the chapter in this volume by Luis Cabrera. 13. My formulation is indebted to, and inspired by, Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 190ff; and David Held, Global Covenant:  The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge, UK:  Polity Press, 2004), 100–​2. For my own statement and defense, see Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, ch. 5; Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice and Institutional Design”; Simon Caney, “Gerechtigkeit, faire Verfahren und Globales Regieren,” in Rainer Forst and Klaus Günther, eds., Die Herausbildung Normativer Ordnungen (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2011), 133–​64. See also the chapter in this volume by Mathias Koenig-​Archibugi. 14.  For discussion of the “affectedness” view (which he terms the “all-​affected view”), see Frederick Whelan’s seminal analysis, “Prologue:  Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem,” in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds., Nomos XXV:  Liberal Democracy (New  York:  New  York University Press, 1983), 13–​ 47, especially 16ff. For affirmation of this view, see Robert E. Goodin, Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 7. 15. I borrow the term “the “subject to the law” approach” from Johan Karlsson’s instructive discussion in Democrats Without Borders: A Critique of Transnational Democracy (Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 2008) 80; cf. 80–​88. To be precise, he calls it the “subject-​to-​the-​law” principle (ibid., 80). This approach is affirmed by Joshua Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 154–​80, at 154 fn 1; see also Dennis F. Thompson, “Representing Future Generations: Political Presentism and Democratic Trusteeship,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 13(2010): 17–​37, at 18. [ 110 ] Simon Caney

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to its laws) are entitled to some kind of participation or representation. These two versions will differ in some respects (though they will often converge in practice). However, what I  want to stress here is that both give voice to a strong conviction about the importance of procedures and representation. They are both interpretations of the fundamental procedural ideal as I have stated it here.16 Now some maintain that if we take this procedural ideal seriously, it calls into question the adequacy of a system of states. David Held, for example, argues that in today’s globalized world, a commitment to democracy requires a commitment to democratic suprastate governance,17 and Thomas Pogge advances a similar claim.18 With this approach, the global nature of power relations entails that if people are to be in charge of their lives, then there need to be democratically run suprastate institutions. Again—​though I  shall not focus on this here—​I think that this is right: given the extent of global integration, the procedural ideal does call for democratic suprastate institutions.19 Both the procedural and the instrumental ideals have some intuitive appeal. On the one hand, there is a clear case for adopting an instrumental point of view. As I said previously, if persons are entitled, as a matter of justice, to certain kinds of treatment, then should not political institutions be designed in such a way that they honor these rights? If we are committed to certain ideals of global justice, then it would be bizarre—​in light of that commitment—​to be indifferent as to whether they are realized or not. Since, moreover, whether 16.  I  have identified two interpretations of the procedural claim. Some suggest a third. For example, Nancy Fraser has defended what she terms “the all-​subjected principle” in Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), 65. This is distinct from the “subject to the law” view, for Fraser proposes to include people in democratic decision-​making even if they are not formally subject to a specific institution’s laws, if their lives are effectively governed by that institution (ibid., 65–​66). Fraser’s view has, as she notes, evolved. Initially, she endorsed a version of the “affectedness” approach, in Scales of Justice (2, 167 fn 29). However, she subsequently thought it would be better to reject the “affectedness” approach and endorse the “all-​subjected” approach (ibid., 173 fn 30; 179 fn 29). She argues that this approach can be found in work by Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel and Rainer Forst (ibid., 180 fn 30). My own view is that Fraser’s work can still be seen as a variant of what I term an “affectedness” approach, broadly construed. Its emphasis on cases where people are subject to the power of others is an emphasis on a particular way of affecting people. It is thus one member of the class of theories which emphasize affectedness. Indeed, some affectedness accounts emphasize that not any kind of affecting triggers the rights to democratic inclusion: Held, Global Covenant, 100–​2; Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 190ff. Others emphasize the nonvoluntary determining of significant interests:  Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, 156; Caney, “Gerechtigkeit, faire Verfahren und Globales Regieren,” 141–​43. 17. David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995). 18. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 190ff. 19. Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice and Institutional Design,” 743–​51.

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they are realized or not depends heavily on the institutional architecture, we have strong reason to design institutions so that they are effective at realizing important social ideals—​most notably, to protect people’s just entitlements. A political order that fails to protect the weak and vulnerable, for example, is not doing its job correctly. To put the point the other way round, if we do not try to create a political environment in which principles of justice are honored, then we are failing to take justice seriously. At the same time, procedural ideals also have considerable appeal. The thought that people are entitled to shape the political environment that structures their world is a powerful one. Without input into the political process, the people are mere subjects. We value the right to be citizens who may determine the forces that govern our lives; and, we may resent a political order in which our lives are determined by others whom we cannot hold to account. The fact that both ideals have intuitive appeal does not, however, preclude the possibility that they might conflict. If they did, that would raise difficult questions about how that tension should be resolved. Should the instrumental ideal take priority? Or, the procedural ideal? Or, one in some circumstances and the other in other circumstances? How could we arbitrate between them? And who should decide? In light of these pressing questions, we need to consider the extent to which the two ideals conflict.

5.3 THE TENSION

To do so, it is worth noting two points. First, we should introduce the fundamental problem. Stated roughly, the central worry is simply that if we take the procedural approach, then we must accept whatever outcomes emerge, but this might not coincide with our conception of the best substantive outcomes and, thus, would diverge from a purely instrumental approach.20 For example, the procedural approach might result in the adoption of policies that are different in their outcomes to those that would be endorsed by the instrumental approach. Alternatively, as we shall see in section 5.7, the procedural approach might result in deadlock, and as such, it also does not promote the best outcomes in the way called for by an instrumental approach. In such cases, the problem is not that the procedure yields unjust policies, but rather that it yields no policies, and as a result, is an obstacle to realizing greater justice. Second, the fundamental problem noted here can take different forms. We can distinguish between what I  shall term “same-​level tensions” and “different-​level tensions.” Same-​level tensions exist when realizing one value 20. For a crisp statement of this kind of clash, see Robert E. Goodin, Green Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1992), 168. [ 112 ] Simon Caney

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at one level of governance (say, the global level) undermines the realization of a competing value at that same level of governance. Suppose, for example, that the global political institutions needed to realize substantive ideals of global economic and environmental justice that are incompatible with procedurally just global political institutions. By contrast, different-​level tensions exist when realizing one value at one level of governance (say, the global level) undermines the realization of a competing value at another level (say, the regional level).21 Some, for instance, might argue that realizing effective global regulation requires overriding local autonomy. To give an example, Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner argue in The Limits of International Law that the pursuit of certain substantive ideals at the international level is incompatible with democratic decisions within the state. So an instrumental approach (at a global level) might clash with a procedural approach (at a domestic level).22 Thus, although the key tension is obvious, it can take different forms. With this in mind, we can now turn to consider how one might seek to combine the instrumental and the procedural approaches to global governance. In the next three sections, I argue that there is no inherent contradiction between them. I do so by advancing three distinct claims.

5.4 THESIS 1: THE INDETERMINACY OF PROCEDURAL JUSTICE

My first claim takes its cue from some remarks made by Philippe Van Parijs in his 2011 book Just Democracy.23 There (as well as in his chapter for this volume), Van Parijs adopts a generally instrumental approach to democracy. Yet he also considers what place procedural values might play. In doing so, he notes that these procedural values are quite indeterminate, and that there is a plurality of ways of instantiating them.24 This indeterminacy is an asset here, for it makes it easier to effect a reconciliation between procedural justice, on the one hand, and substantive justice, on the other.

21. For a related, but distinct, tension, see Dani Rodrik’s argument in The Globalization Paradox:  Why Global Markets, States, and Democracy Can’t Coexist (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 9, esp. 200ff. Rodrik argues that we face a trilemma and cannot have democracy, hyperglobalization, and national sovereignty. For example, if we insist on hyperglobalization and keeping political power at the level of the nation-​ state, then this must come at the cost of genuine democratic governance. 22.  Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner, The Limits of International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 23. Philippe Van Parijs, Just Democracy: The Rawls-​Machiavelli Programme (Colchester, UK: European Consortium for Political Research Press, 2011). 24. See Van Parijs, Just Democracy, 3.

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Political actors can realize such a reconciliation by choosing whichever variant of procedural justice that is available that best promotes the instrumental values.25 Now, the more determinate the notion of procedural justice (that is, the more specific it is in its requirements), the harder it would be to reconcile the procedural and substantive ideals, for it makes the prospects of convergence much less likely. And by the same token, the more indeterminate it is, the more flexibility it offers, and thus, the easier it is to satisfy procedural justice while also securing substantive justice. To see how this might work, let us consider the many different ways in which one might realize the procedural ideal. Even a cursory examination reveals that there are numerous ways in which political orders might differ quite considerably while still, at the same time, being said to honor the procedural ideal. They can, for example, differ in all of the following possible ways.

5.4.1 The Level of Democratic Governance

Some may think democratic governance requires directly elected global institutions, such as a global parliament.26 Others might think there should be global institutions whose members are appointed by states, and that each state should be democratic. The idea, then, would be that democratic member-​ states can scrutinize the global political institutions. These two differ, then, about the question of where democratic power is located. One locates it at the global level, the other at the level of states.

5.4.2 Unif ied Versus Fragmented Political Orders

A second way in which procedural models may differ would be whether the political order has a unified decision-​making process which treats all policy questions (such as trade, development, aid, migration, health, labor rights, climate change, biodiversity loss, science and technology, and so on) together; 25. As Van Parijs puts the point: “Knowing that, for intrinsic reasons, a just polity must be a democracy leaves wide open the question of which, among the countless democratic setups, is, for instrumental reasons, the just one:” ibid.; see also Just Democracy, ch. 2. For a nice exemplification of his approach, see the excellent discussions of intergenerational justice in ­chapter 4, in which Van Parijs examines a number of very different ways of structuring democratic decision-​making in order to best realize the equitable treatment of future generations. Incidentally, it is not clear that Van Parijs’s rationale for making this point is the same as mine: that is, the desire to effect a reconciliation between procedural and instrumental perspectives. My point here is that it is useful for that end, whether or not that is his intention. 26. For example, see Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss, “Toward Global Parliament,” Foreign Affairs 80(2001): 212–​20. [ 114 ] Simon Caney

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or whether it has a fragmented one, in which trade, say, is dealt with primarily at one body, as it is with the World Trade Organization (WTO), and climate change at another, as it is with the current United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and labor rights at another, as it is with the International Labour Organization (ILO). Suppose that one calls for democratic governance at the global level: this might mean a world parliament, or it might mean democratizing the different institutions charged with some specific area of policymaking. Note that one might take fragmentation one step further. One might think, that is, that even in one policy area, decision-​making capacities can, and should, be distributed to multiple agencies with in it. For example, Elinor Ostrom defended what she termed a “polycentric” mode of governance for addressing climate change, in which decisions are made by a number of separate bodies, all independent of each other.27

5.4.3 Constitutional Structures and Decision-​M aking Procedures

A third way in which accounts of procedural justice can be realized in different ways concerns the governing rules within the decision-​making process. One might distinguish between “majoritarian” approaches and those centred around “consensus.”28

5.4.4 Different Modes of Electoral Accountability

In addition to this, honoring the procedural ideal is compatible with a variety of different modes of representation and accountability. Suppose, for example, one calls for a global Parliament (or for democratizing different international institutions that currently exist). There are different ways in which one might make them electorally accountable. Thomas Franck, for example, proposed that the General Assembly of the United Nations be transformed into a body with two houses—​one in which states each have one representative and then

27. Elinor Ostrom, “Polycentric Systems for Coping with Collective Action and Global Environmental Change,” Global Environmental Change 20(2010): 550–​57. 28. Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-​ Six Countries, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2012), chs. 2–​3; For a discussion of different voting systems that might be applied to global climate negotiations (i.e., those of the UNFCCC), see Luke Tomlinson, Procedural Justice in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change:  Negotiating Fairness (New York: Springer, 2015), ch. 7.

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a second in which countries are represented in proportion to population size.29 Others might prefer other principles of representation.

5.4.5 The Role of Advisory Bodies

A further dimension in which political structures might vary—​ while still respecting core democratic commitments to political equality and accountability—​concerns the role of advisory bodies. Some, for example, call for a High Commissioner for Future Generations (or, alternatively, a High Commission for Future Generations). Several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have argued that this is needed to promote intergenerational justice at the global level, arguing that there needs to be an institutional agent who can voice the interests of future generations.30 Others have argued for other kinds of institutional reforms. The central point is that different democratic frameworks can give differing roles to advisory bodies and ombudspersons. The general point I am making is one that will be well known to those familiar with debates about electoral reform, for one key point made in that context (and leveled against certain forms of proportional representation) concerns the likelihood of coalition government and the likelihood of that leading to unstable government. The argument, in short, is that we should favor one kind of electoral system over another because one is less likely to result in certain kinds of outcomes. Now, setting aside the question of whether proportional representation would in fact lead to constantly changing governments, and also whether that is undesirable, the central point is that we do evaluate different procedural proposals by virtue of their likely results. Thesis 1 is simply a recognition of this kind of point.

29. Thomas M. Franck, Fairness in International Law and Institutions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 483–​84. 30. See Simon Caney, “Applying the Principle of Intergenerational Equity to the 2015 Multilateral Processes,” report for the Mary Robinson Foundation—​Climate Justice (2014); Mary Robinson Foundation—​Climate Justice, “Meeting the Needs of Future Generations: Applying the Principle of Intergenerational Equity to the 2015 Processes on Climate Change and Sustainable Development” (August 12, 2015), http://​www. mrfcj.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2015/​09/​MRFCJPositionPaper_​MeetingtheNeedsofF utureGenerations_​12August2015.pdf; Marcos Orellana, Catherine Pearce, and Yulia Genin, The High Commissioner for Future Generations: The Future We Want (Center for International Environmental Law and World Future Council, 2012), http://​www. worldfuturecouncil.org/​fileadmin/​user_​upload/​Future_​Justice/​High_​Commissioner_​ for_​Future_​Generations.pdf; Report of the United Nations Secretary-​ General, “Intergenerational Solidarity and the Needs of Future Generations,” Sixty-​Eighth Session of United Nations General Assembly (August 5, 2013), Section III, Subsection E, §§53–​61 and Section IV, §§63–​64). http://​sustainabledevelopment.un.org/​content/​ documents/​2006future.pdf. [ 116 ] Simon Caney

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In the context of global governance, the upshot of this point is that agents should identify a wide variety of procedurally fair decision-​making processes at the global level, and then they should select from among that set whichever versions are most likely to promote a fairer world. If, for example, the creation of a High Commissioner for Future Generations would help protect the interests of future generations (and increase the likelihood of states implementing policies that result in an environmentally sustainable world—​ one which, among other things, promotes sustainable development), then there is a case for instituting such an institution, and doing so does not compromise any procedural values.31 Consider another example. Suppose that having a fragmented political order in which different policy issues are dealt with by different agencies results in bad outcomes. Suppose, for example, that the policies adopted by some agencies (e.g., those concerning trade) undermine the policies adopted by others (those concerning labor rights or climate change), and that what results is policies counteracting each other and producing an incoherent mismatch of policies. In such a state of affairs, then, other things being equal, there is a case for a unified order, in which political actors make decisions that cover all the relevant issues. So, if this line of reasoning is correct and if it defeats any countervailing considerations, then we should prefer a procedurally just, unified order over a procedurally just, fragmented one. The central point, then, is that the diverse ways of realizing the procedural ideal provide agents with the opportunity to choose those variants which best realize substantive ideals of global justice.32

31. Caney, “Applying the Principle of Intergenerational Equity.” 32. As an anonymous referee noted, my argument here (and indeed, an instrumentalist approach more generally) presupposes that we have clear enough evidence of the ways in which different kinds of democratic arrangement will tend to yield certain kinds of outcomes. This is true and an important observation; and a full statement of my view would need ideally to provide both (1) evidence of these kinds of patterns and (2) an explanation of the underlying causal mechanisms. I cannot provide a full statement here. However, I do not think that this poses an insuperable obstacle. In part this is because there is an instructive empirical literature on different kinds of global governance arrangements and their predictable effects. See, for example, the works by Scott Barrett, Elinor Ostrom, David Victor, and Thomas Hale, David Held, and Kevin Young that I  refer to in this chapter. For further instructive discussion, see Robert O. Keohane, “Governance in a Partially Globalized World,” American Political Science Review 95(2001): 1–​13; and for a discussion of the nature of an effective climate governance regime in particular, see Robert O. Keohane and David G. Victor, “The Regime Complex for Climate Change,” Perspectives on Politics 9(2011): 7–​23. I think this body of work (as well as that of many other scholars working on international institutions) can give us guidance on the likely effects of different governance arrangements for realizing cosmopolitan ideals.

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5.5 THESIS 2: THE INDETERMINACY OF DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

My first reconciliatory point focused on the flexible character of procedural justice. My second turns its attention to the nature of distributive justice and argues that it too is more flexible than one might at first assume. One way of arguing for this point would be to argue that justice has a sufficientarian character,33 and that this allows diversity above the sufficiency threshold. This route is, however, unavailable for those who think that justice takes a different form. For example, egalitarians who are concerned about inequalities above sufficiency threshold(s), or those whose account of justice has a maximizing component (such as to maximize growth or maximize the condition of the least advantaged) cannot appeal to this kind of argument. Here, I wish to advance a slightly less familiar proposal. The proposal has two elements. It maintains, first, that substantive accounts of justice specify the extent of people’s entitlements (how much they are entitled to) and the extent of their responsibilities (how much they are required to do). So, substantive accounts of justice specify what principles of justice apply (sufficiency, equality, or some other principle) and who should bear the responsibilities involved in realizing these principles. However, to this it adds, second, that people’s entitlements can be realized in a variety of different ways, and their responsibilities can be discharged in different ways. Hence, it concludes, procedurally just institutions can play a role specifying what precise form persons’ entitlements take, and also precisely how persons discharge their responsibilities.34 As such, one can jointly honor substantive justice, on the one hand, with a commitment to procedural justice, on the other. To introduce and illustrate this point, I shall give two examples that arise in the context of addressing dangerous global climate change.

5.5.1 Realizing Persons’ Entitlements

Consider people’s entitlements first. Preventing dangerous climate change from occurring requires limiting the emission of greenhouse gases. In light of this, many propose principles of distributive justice which take as the good to be distributed “rights to emit greenhouse gases.” I have argued elsewhere, however, that such a claim is not the best way to think about climate justice.35 33. Harry Frankfurt, “Equality as a Moral Ideal,” Ethics 98(1987): 21–​43. 34. For an excellent account of the role that political institutions can play in addressing the indeterminacy I am discussing, see Allen Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-​ Determination:  Moral Foundations for International Law (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004), 180ff. 35.  Simon Caney, “Just Emissions,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 40(2012):  255–​300, at 285–​91; Tim Hayward, “Human Rights Versus Emissions Rights:  Climate Justice [ 118 ] Simon Caney

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While it is imperative that there are strict limits on the emission of greenhouse gases, it does not follow, and it is not true that persons necessarily have distributive claims to specific quantities of greenhouse gas emissions. What persons have entitlements to, I submit, is the realization of some core interests (including food, water, health, education, and so on). Now, realizing these interests has often tended to involve high levels of greenhouse gas emissions because the energy employed to promote these interests is normally fossil fuel–​based. However, these interests can be realized in other ways, using other sources of energy (such as solar photovoltaics, geothermal, tidal, wave, hydroelectricity, wind, biomass, nuclear, and potentially other sources of energy that have yet to be discovered). In addition, promoting energy use can often involve not more fossil fuels, but more efficient use of existing energy sources. The central point, then, is that justice should be concerned with people’s enjoyment of various interests and, moreover, that these interests require energy, but that this can be promoted in a variety of different ways. Note, moreover, that this is true of other activities that produce greenhouse gases. For example, food production results in greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture is responsible for about 10 percent to 12 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.36 Food production results in emissions through the use of fertilizers (which releases N2O), and manure (which releases CH4 and N2O). Persons’ interest in food, can, however, also be realized in different ways, including ways that result in considerably lower emissions.37 Now, this diversity in the ways of securing people’s entitlements is relevant to the project animating this chapter because we need some way of deciding what particular ways specific people’s interests in food, water, health, and other areas are met, and procedural accounts can perform exactly this role. That is, one can create procedurally just decision-​making bodies to help turn abstract claims about people’s entitlements into more concrete and specific distributions of goods. With this proposal, they would decide whose entitlements to energy are best met by using wind, solar, or some other energy mix, and whose might be met in different ways. Indeed, it is not only the case that procedural accounts can perform this role. We can go further. It seems plausible to suggest that they, and only they, should perform this role. It would be wrong for one party or group of parties (say, the most powerful states) to determine the form that people’s entitlements take. Rather, and the Equitable Distribution of Ecological Space,” Ethics and International Affairs 21(2007): 431–​50. 36.  Pete Smith and Mercedes Bustamante, “Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use (AFOLU),” in Ottmar Edenhofer, et  al., eds, Climate Change 2014:  Mitigation of Climate Change:  Working Group III Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2014), 811–​922, at 822. 37. Caney, “Just Emissions,” 288.

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it would be better to set up procedurally just decision-​making institutions to decide what specific form persons’ entitlements should take.

5.5.2 Discharging Responsibilities

An analogous point can be made about discharging responsibilities. Consider climate change. Combating climate change requires that humanity at large perform a variety of kinds of activity. These include mitigating climate change by (a) reducing greenhouse gas emissions, (b) protecting and enhancing greenhouse gas sinks, and (c) developing clean technology and ensuring that it is available to all. They also include, (d), adaptation policies that enable people to enjoy their rights in a warming world (say, by giving them greater protection from the increased incidence of diseases that will result from climate change). To this, we should also add, (e), compensating people for “loss and damage” when there has been insufficient mitigation and adaptation. Consider now the principles by which we might distribute climate burdens. Commonly affirmed principles include the doctrine that the Polluter should pay (the Polluter Pays Principle—​PPP) and the doctrine that those with the greatest ability to bear the burden should do so (the Ability to Pay Principle—​ AP). Now appealing to these kinds of principles can specify how the costs of combating climate change should be distributed. But—​and this is the crucial point—​they do not specify how individual parties should discharge their responsibilities. Suppose, for example, that we calculate the financial cost of the necessary adaptation, mitigation, and compensation. Principles like the PPP and AP will be able to say how much of the costs given agents should bear. What matters here is (a) that the appropriate amount of mitigation, adaptation, and compensation occurs, and (b) that the costs of these three kinds of policies are borne equitably. But this is compatible with countries with identical responsibilities (defined in terms of how much of the cost parties should bear) discharging them in different ways (one, say, funding more technological innovation than another, and the other spending more on adaptation). The same point can be made in a different way. Suppose that someone denies that we should calculate the combined financial costs of mitigation and adaptation and compensation and share out the costs equitably. Suppose that they think we should assign specific mitigation responsibilities to different countries. Even so, this leaves it open as to how individual countries mitigate. There will be some limits on how they mitigate (they should eschew ones that impose harms on others), but there is a tremendous amount of flexibility too. States can mitigate by using carbon taxes or emission-​trading schemes or regulations; and if they use one of these, say, emission-​trading schemes, then they can choose which kind of scheme they prefer (an upstream one, which [ 120 ] Simon Caney

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auctions permits off to companies, or a downstream one, which allocates individual emissions permits to individuals). They can thus choose from a wide variety of mitigation instruments, just so long as it honors the relevant principles of climate justice. The point, then, is that principles of climate responsibility can be realized in different ways. And this allows—​indeed calls for—​the use of political processes to help determine more concretely which particular policies are enacted, and by whom. Political processes can, therefore, convert the general abstract distribution of responsibilities into specific and concrete tasks. To sum up this second reconciliatory claim, then, there can be a division of labor between substantive and procedural ideals. The former specify people’s entitlements and responsibilities in abstract and general terms. The decision-​ making procedures cannot challenge or override these principles. However, what they can do is help to determine what these abstract claims about persons’ entitlements and responsibilities mean in practice.

5.6 THESIS 3: THE IMPRECISE CHARACTER OF INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN

The potential tension between an instrumental and procedural approach is also alleviated by a third consideration. Suppose that we set aside the last two points. It is arguable that there might be a tension between the two approaches if one could design institutional frameworks with such precision and specificity that one could coherently aim to design political institutions so that they will further one’s specific distributive ideal. My preferred ideal is one where persons enjoy equal opportunities to lead rich and rewarding lives. It thus affirms an egalitarian principle and a particular metric of justice.38 It would, though, be extremely implausible to think that one could design a specific institutional order in such a way that it would likely issue in this particular outcome. Institutional design is a crude and imprecise instrument: one can design institutions in ways that might result in certain broadly defined outcomes—​say, reducing current inequalities, or coping better with famine,39 or making war less likely to occur.40 But it seems very implausible to think 38.  Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice and Equalizing Opportunities,” Metaphilosophy 32(2001): 113–​34; Simon Caney, “Humanity, Associations, and Global Justice:  In Defence of Humanity-​Centred Cosmopolitan Egalitarianism,” The Monist 94(2011): 506–​34. 39.  Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines:  An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). 40. See Michael Doyle’s discussion of the empirical data in “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12(1983):  205–​35; Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part  2,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12(1983): 323–​53.

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that one could design it so as to achieve something as specific as equality of access to a fulfilling life. The kind of order that proponents of global equality would favor would seem to be hard to distinguish from the kind of order that proponents of global priority would favor. So, given our inability to design institutions to produce specific outcomes, one potential source of conflict is shown to be misconceived. This feature has several sources. One is that the likely effects of different institutional reforms are dependent on the policies of actors located within those institutions. They have agency, and so notwithstanding the fact that different institutional architectures will generate different constraints, opportunities, and incentives, the impacts of institutional reforms will depend on exactly how the actors respond. So though they might make it more likely that certain outcomes will be realized, it is not possible to design them to ensure that any narrowly defined set of objectives is realized.41 To this, we should add that there are also severe epistemic and cognitive limits to institutional design. There are often unforeseen impacts and unintended outcomes, and this fact further undercuts any suggestion of designing institutions to get very specific outcomes.42 More generally, political institutions are likely to have general tendencies (rather than iron laws) to result in general broadly defined trends (such as, for example, that transparency makes it harder to engage in corrupt practices), and they will not necessarily issue in particular states of affairs. As such, they are very hard to design to produce very specific outcomes. This helps my reconciliatory position for the following reason: Were it the case that one could design institutions to create particular outcomes (like global equality of opportunity), then it raises the possibility that we might be asked to choose between fair procedures, on the one hand, and procedures which secure the preferred outcome, on the other. The upshot of the preceding analysis is that that is not a live option.

5.7 AN OBJECTION: DEADLOCK

Having outlined three reasons why the procedural and instrumental conceptions of global governance need not diverge, I now want to confront a natural concern that might arise. Someone familiar with international negotiations might present the following objection: multilateral negotiations

41. See, in a similar spirit, Joseph Raz’s comments on how coercion is an “indiscriminate” instrument for realizing social objectives—​in his case, furthering people’s well-​ being: The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 418–​19. 42. Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 4. [ 122 ] Simon Caney

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must—​to be legitimate and to honor the procedural ideal—​be maximally inclusive. They need, that is, to include representatives from all states. Notwithstanding the flexible character of procedural justice (as exploited by Thesis 1), there are limits; and one core element that cannot be weakened is that procedural ideal requires the input of people from all states in some form. But if we are to have a global decision-​making system that includes representatives from each state, the argument runs, it is almost certain to lead to deadlock. The more actors there are, the harder it is to reach agreement. The very factor that procedural justice insists on (inclusion) will lead to so many actors that it thwarts the realization of substantive justice. In support of this proposition, the critic might draw attention to the deadlock that afflicts multilateral trade negotiations,43 as well as attempts to reform the governance of global finance.44 The critic might also draw attention to the challenges facing global climate governance. The recent Paris Agreement, for example, secured agreement, in part, by not allocating particular responsibilities that specified who should bear how much of the burden of combating climate change. So, although it committed to “[h]‌olding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-​industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-​industrial levels” (Article 2.1(a)), it did not specify responsibilities and thus avoided the difficult question of who should pay how much of the cost of mitigation and adaptation.45 This objection is, of course, an important one and raises a powerful challenge. I  think, however, that several responses can be made. I  draw on the case of climate change to make my points, though I think that the points can be generalized. I choose climate change because it has as good a claim as any—​perhaps the best claim—​to be a deeply intractable problem.

5.7.1 Reconciling Inclusion with Effective Action

One response that might be made is that there are institutional reforms that can be implemented which successfully combine inclusive governance with effective decision-​making. An interesting example of this is proposed by Robyn Eckersley.46 She contrasts two common ways of thinking of global governance, especially the negotiations surrounding addressing climate 43. Thomas Hale, David Held, and Kevin Young, Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), 154–​62. 44. Ibid., 162–​82. 45.  See the Paris Agreement at http://​unfccc.int/​resource/​docs/​2015/​cop21/​eng/​ l09r01.pdf. 46. Robyn Eckersley, “Moving Forward in the Climate Negotiations: Multilateralism or Minilateralism?” Global Environmental Politics 12(2012): 24–​42.

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change. One, “multilateralism,” emphasizes the importance of multilateral negotiations, and it does so on the grounds that political legitimacy requires an inclusive approach. In addition, adherents to this approach, Eckersley argues, have said that inclusive multilateral governance should impose less-​ demanding requirements on developing states as compared to other more affluent states. However, such multilateralism has generally met with resistance from the major powers, who are unwilling to agree to these demands, and so multilateralism risks deadlock.47 A second approach adopts a diametrically opposed strategy. It emphasizes decisive action, and for that reason, it calls for “minilateralism”; that is, for a small group of powerful states to coordinate and implement policies. Often, for example, it is suggested that the major emitters should get together and reach an agreement.48 This, it is often argued, can deliver decisive and effective action. However, as Eckersley notes, this approach has faced three problems. First, the suggestion in the context of climate change negotiations that a small group of major emitters will avoid disagreement ignores the fact that one central disagreement has been between major emitters such as the United States and China. Second, a group that comprises only the major emitters is unlikely to reach an agreement that adequately protects the interests of those threatened by climate change. They may be able to reach an agreement only if it does not require major cuts in their emissions, and this will result in an agreement that suits emitters, but not the potential victims of climate change. Third, if policy is made by a small clique (as was the case in the Conference of the Parties negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009), then it is likely to lack legitimacy.49 In light of this, Eckersley proposes a third option—​what she terms “inclusive minilateralism.”50 The central idea is that there should be a small “Climate Council” that includes representatives of states according to three principles—​those that are the most responsible for the problem, those with the greatest capability to effect a transition to a low-​carbon economy, and the most vulnerable states. This council would be charged with addressing the key issues:  the appropriate climate target and the allocation of responsibilities. Since it has a restricted membership, it is likely to help bring about an agreement (more so than standard multilateral negotiations); and since its membership is representative, it is likely to enjoy procedural legitimacy (more so than standard minilateral negotiations). Now, what is important about Eckersley’s proposal in this context is that it is a promising way of combining a commitment to the procedural ideal since 47. Ibid., 29–​32. 48. Ibid., 32–​33. 49. Ibid., 33–​34. 50. Ibid., 35–​38, 38ff. [ 124 ] Simon Caney

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representatives of all the parties to the UNFCCC are all included; and it also manifests a commitment to the instrumental ideal, for it proposes an effective decision-​making process that is less likely to get embroiled in disagreement and also includes morally relevant parties. Eckersley’s proposal has not gone uncriticized. Peter Lawrence argues that it does not tackle the root underlying conflict that stems from competing economic interests.51 Furthermore, he argues that there is already a mechanism for including a group of state delegations that is small and also includes representatives from vulnerable states, as well as from high emitters. The chairperson of the negotiations can convene a “Friends of the Chair” group that already performs a similar role to the Climate Council envisaged by Eckersley.52 A second response comes from Hayley Stevenson and John Dryzek, who argue that Eckersley’s institutional proposal would be insufficiently inclusive of different viewpoints—​what they call “discourses.”53 They favor instead a system in which there is what they term a “Chamber of Discourses,” where this is a body which includes representatives of different discourses; that is, different perspectives on how to address climate change.54 Neither of these critiques seems to me conclusive. Eckersley can respond to Lawrence that while there are inescapably divergent economic perspectives, it does not follow that institutional arrangements can make no difference to the possibility of reaching agreement or the quality of the agreement reached. She might also reply that Lawrence gives no reason why his suggestion for using “Friends of the Chair” would have the legitimacy that a Climate Council might enjoy. Furthermore, she might reply to Stevenson and Dryzek that a Chamber of Discourses is inadequate. What matters is representing people, not ideas or discourses, and that her proposal, unlike theirs, reflects that. The main point to be made, however, is that, in one sense, the criticisms leveled by Lawrence and Stevenson and Dryzek illustrate my point—​namely, that there is a diversity of creative and innovative ways of addressing deadlock.

5.7.2 Promoting Cooperation

My first response to the problem about deadlock drew attention to innovative institutional reforms. A second point that can be made in response to the 51. Peter Lawrence, Justice for Future Generations: Climate Change and International Law (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2014), 178. 52. Ibid. 53. Hayley Stevenson and John S. Dryzek, Democratizing Global Climate Governance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 191–​92, 196–​98. 54.  Ibid., 196ff; Their discussion here draws on an earlier paper that Dryzek coauthored with Simon Niemeyer, “Discursive Representation,” American Political Science Review 102(2008): 481–​93 at 485–​92.

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concerns about deadlock is this: The question of whether political procedures result in conflict does not depend on institutional design alone. It also depends on how agents—​both those who are participants in the formal policymaking process and those who are not formal participants in the process—​behave, and whether they act in ways that further cooperation or not. In the case of participants, whether deadlock results or not depends on the extent to which the political elites of the major economic and political powers exercise leadership or not. We would be letting them off the hook too easily if we blamed deadlock solely on institutional design. Politicians, of course, do not perform in a vacuum. They require electoral support and reassurance from their electorate that they will not be punished for the policies they support. This, in turn, means that responsibility falls to the citizens of states to reward politicians who endorse effective and just climate policies and penalize those who do not.55 This last point may not give us much hope. However, it bears making because it makes clear that it would be a mistake to blame deadlock on the institutional architecture alone. Responsibility also falls to the agents who work within those political structures, and to those who support them and keep them in their place. Can we, though, find ways of reducing deadlock? I think we can. To see this (and to continue with the focus on climate change as an example of an intractable problem), we should note that one key source of conflict is that there is a limited budget of permissible greenhouse gases. States are thus competing over a finite sum. Given this, there is likely to be intractable conflict. One vital step to help facilitate agreement, then, is to create substitutes: other sources of energy that are affordable, efficient, and do not have harmful side effects. Doing so would not only greatly assist with the task of eradicating poverty, but—​and this is the key point here—​it also makes it much easier to reach an effective climate treaty because they do not have to agree on how to distribute a finite sum of greenhouses gases. I think it is noteworthy that empirically informed and experienced climate change analysts such as Scott Barrett, Dieter Helm, and David Victor converge on exactly this point.56 In short, then, institutional structures do not determine whether there will be deadlock or not. Notwithstanding their great importance, it is possible for both those who are participants in the political process to show leadership 55.  Simon Caney, “Two Kinds of Climate Justice:  Avoiding Harm and Sharing Burdens,” Journal of Political Philosophy 22(2014): 125–​49, at 131. 56.  Scott Barrett, Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-​ Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 393–​98; Dieter Helm, The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong—​and How to Fix It (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), ch. 11; David G. Victor, Global Warming Gridlock: Creating More Effective Strategies for Protecting the Planet (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2011), ch. 5. [ 126 ] Simon Caney

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and those outside the political process to act in ways that facilitate agreement. Both responses, then—​reconciling inclusion with effective action and promoting cooperation—​help meet the concern about deadlock.

5.7.3 Going Beyond Compatibility

This concludes my case for thinking that the instrumental and procedural ideals of global governance are not necessarily in conflict. Any tension between them can be defused by the three considerations I  have adduced in sections 5.4 to 5.6, and the worries about deadlock, though serious and troubling, are not insurmountable. To all these points, it is worth adding—​and this is my final claim—​that in arguing for the compatibility of the instrumental and procedural ideals, I am not foreclosing the possibility of arguing for a stronger link between the procedural and instrumental ideals. Quite the opposite, in fact—​indeed, it seems highly plausible to me that the two ideals are mutually supportive, by which I mean that realizing the procedural view is likely to help realize the instrumental view, and realizing the instrumental view is likely to help realize the procedural view. Why might one endorse this stronger conclusion? Though I lack the space to make the full case here, I shall conclude by referring to two reasons to think that the relationship between the instrumental and procedural approaches to global governance goes beyond mere compatibility and also would be one of mutual support.

5.8 THESIS 4: THE PROCEDURAL IDEAL AND EQUALITY

The first (our fourth thesis) can be stated as follows: The procedural ideal (on any plausible interpretation of that ideal) requires a degree of equality. The underlying reason for this is familiar. It runs as follows: The procedural ideal has value, to a large extent, as a fair way of responding to reasonable disagreement.57 However, if it is to be a fair way of responding to such disagreement, then all parties must have the de facto capacity to take part on equal terms. It would not be fair if some—​because of their wealth—​were able to exercise a much greater impact on the process than others. So, given this, a commitment to the procedural ideal gives us some reason to endorse greater socioeconomic equality. If we want suprastate, state-​level, and substate-​level 57.  For one version of this line of reasoning, see Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); for an earlier influential statement, see Peter Singer, Democracy and Disobedience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

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political processes to be genuinely fair, then there must be much greater socioeconomic equality than currently exists. I have inserted the phrase “on any plausible interpretation of that ideal” to reflect the fact that the procedural ideal can be interpreted in different ways (a point that I, of course, exploited in defending the first thesis). However, it seems reasonable to suggest that although procedural justice can be realized in different ways, stark inequalities in economic power are inimical to any credible interpretation of that ideal.58 To this, we can now also add the next point.

5.9 THESIS 5: THE PROCEDURAL IDEAL AND JUST OUTCOMES

This holds that a global order that honors the procedural ideal is more likely to promote substantively just outcomes than the alternatives. Granting power to powerful agents who are not held accountable by those whose rights and interests are at stake seems a recipe for dysfunctional and unjust government. Again, this will be a highly familiar view, and this point is often made in the context of the state.59 However, for the same reasons, it is also likely to apply globally. Thus, although much more argument and evidence would be needed to vindicate Theses 4 and 5, I state them to make clear that in arguing for the compatibility of the procedural and instrumental ideals, I am not precluding any stronger links, and furthermore to draw attention to two reasons we have to think that a stronger relationship might hold.

5.10 CONCLUSION

This chapter has examined the relationship between two ideals of global institutional design. It has done so because both have considerable intuitive appeal, and many are attracted to both. It would thus be a considerable 58.  For arguments from procedural justice to socioeconomic equality, see T.  M. Scanlon, “The Diversity of Objections to Inequality,” in T.  M. Scanlon, The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, February 22, 1996, 3–​4, and reprinted in T. M. Scanlon, The Difficulty of Tolerance:  Essays in Political Philosophy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003), 202–​18. See also Charles R. Beitz, “Does Global Inequality Matter?” Metaphilosophy 32(2001):  95–​ 112, at 107–​ 9; and Joshua Cohen’s discussion of “bootstrapping,” by which he means deriving egalitarian commitments from reflecting on what is needed to realize the value of formal liberal freedoms and opportunities:  “Moral Pluralism and Political Consensus,” in Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays, 38–​60, at 48ff. 59. For one example of this kind of reasoning, see Amartya Sen (2000), Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books) especially ch. 6. [ 128 ] Simon Caney

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problem if the two clashed in their prescriptions. It has also done so because some, appealing to one value (e.g., realizing substantive goals), have supposed that there is a deep conflict, and thus have argued that we should sacrifice the other (e.g., the procedural ideal). I have argued, however, that we are not faced with this difficult choice. Although at first glance, it is reasonable to worry that they might pull in different directions, I have argued that they can be rendered compatible. This reconciliation is possible, in part, because the procedural ideal can be realized in a variety of different ways, so we can choose ways that best approximate the instrumental ideal (Thesis 1); the substantive ideals to be promoted on a plausible instrumental view can also (perhaps surprisingly) also be realized in a number of different ways, and so can be designed in ways that are consistent with, and can utilize, fair procedures (Thesis 2); and the imprecise and approximate nature of global institutional design makes it unlikely that we face the choice between a political order that realizes the best substantive ideal and one that embodies procedural ideals of justice (Thesis 3). In these ways, I  hope to have eased the potential tensions between the two ideals. Furthermore, although decision-​making processes that comply with the procedural ideal face the prospect of deadlock, this is not set in stone, and through imaginative institutional design, political leadership, and the right combination of critical support from individuals, NGOs, and other organizations, we are able to combine procedural justice with effective decision-​making.60

60. I am grateful to Luis Cabrera and an anonymous referee for instructive comments and suggestions.

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CHAPTER 6

Reform, Resist, Create Institutional Cosmopolitanism and Duties Toward Suprastate Institutions LUIS C ABRER A  

6.1 INTRODUCTION

As global economic integration and forms of global governance have intensified and expanded, so have concerns about legitimacy beyond the state. Scholars, including a number of cosmopolitan theorists, have offered detailed arguments both for conceptualizing the legitimacy of suprastate institutions and taking steps to enhance it.1 Yet relatively few have explored    I thank for their helpful comments Laura Valentini, Daniele Archibugi, David Bailey, Simon Caney, Mathias Koenig-​Archibugi, Jennifer Cyd Rubenstein, Thomas Pogge, Richard Shapcott, Catherine Lu, Tom Buitelaar, and the anonymous reviewer for this volume. Early versions of some arguments here were presented at the International Global Ethics Association meeting in Bristol in 2010 and the 2011 annual meeting of the International Studies Association in Montreal. 1.  Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane, “The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions,” Ethics & International Affairs 20, no. 4 (2006):  405–​37; Simon Caney, “The Responsibilities and Legitimacy of Economic International Institutions,” in Lukas Meyer, ed., Justice, Legitimacy, and Public International Law (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009), 92–​ 122; Allen Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 5; see also John Tasioulas, “The Legitimacy of International Institutions,” in Samantha Besson and John Tasioulas, eds., The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010), 97–​118; Robert Keohane, Stephen Macedo, and Andrew Moravcsik, “Democracy-​Enhancing Multilateralism,” International Organization 63, no. 1 (2009):  1–​31; Dominik Zaum, ed., Legitimating International Organizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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related questions around “suprastate political obligation,” or individual duties oriented toward suprastate institutions.2 The aim here is to help advance the dialogue through developing a preliminary rubric for such duties. In the domestic context, of course, political obligation has been a central concern of theorists at least since Plato’s Crito.3 Leading accounts continue to address whether it is possible to establish a general duty to comply with the law,4 and circumstances under which noncompliance may be permissible.5 The focus here will be more broadly on institutionally oriented duties rather than political obligation per se. This is in part because suprastate institutions do not typically demand comprehensive compliance with laws in the way that institutions of the state do, and their demands most often are mediated through state institutions. In addition, duties beyond the state are likely to include ones to create political institutions which do not yet exist, in fact, much more likely than in the domestic context. Some primary duties could thus be ones to help create the circumstances in which law or rules can be produced and compliance sought, rather than to obey existing laws or state-​mediated governance. The argument is structured as follows: Section 6.2 defines political legitimacy and discusses some means of determining which sorts of suprastate institutions are most salient to treatments of legitimacy and of institutionally oriented individual duties. Section 6.3 presents the influential view of suprastate legitimacy developed by Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane. Section 6.4 critically engages their rejection of specifying individual duties in the suprastate context, while outlining an approach to both suprastate legitimacy and individual duties centering on individual rights protections. Section 6.5 offers an institutional cosmopolitan analysis, highlighting reasons to think that providing such protections for all persons likely would require global institutional transformation and integration over time. With such an integrated institutional end point in mind, Section 6.6 proposes some present-​day 2. However, see Pavlos Eleftheriadis, “Citizenship and Obligation,” in Julie Dickson and Pavlos Eleftheriadis, eds., Philosophical Foundations of European Union Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012), 159–​88. Eleftheriadis offers a careful exploration of some issues around political obligation in the European Union (EU); see also Caney, “Responsibilities and Legitimacy.” 3.  Plato, Crito, in Harold Tarrant, ed., The Last Days of Socrates (London:  Penguin, 1993), 71–​92. 4.  George Klosko, Political Obligations (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2005); Richard Dagger and David Lefkowitz, “Political Obligation,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014), https://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​fall2014/​entries/​political-​ obligation/​; see also A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 57–​74; Allen Buchanan, “Political Legitimacy and the Morality of Political Power,” Ethics 112, no. 4 (2002): 689–​719. 5.  Kimberley Brownlee, Conscience and Conviction:  The Case for Civil Disobedience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); see Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), ch. 8.

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individual duties oriented to suprastate institutions. These include duties of critical compliance and support, institutional reform and resistance, institutional rejection in some cases, and support for institutional creation. Some means are discussed of determining which duties are applicable to which institutions, with emphasis on rejecting institutions which would be inconsistent with a legitimate global system, meaning one which would reliably protect and promote core individual rights for all persons. Overall, such an approach should give some important guidance on suprastate duties in the near term, for example, on whether individuals should support their own states’ involvement in regional integration projects, as in the 2016 British referendum vote on withdrawing from EU membership. It also should provide guidance on a range of other possible suprastate duties, while provoking important questions about whether a global system composed of independent sovereign states can actually be legitimate, given its inherent tendencies toward the gross underfulfillment of individual rights.

6.2 POLITICAL LEGITIMACY AND SUPRANATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

In terms of political legitimacy, then, the emphasis here is on moral legitimacy, or what can justify the coercion that political institutions exercise on individuals. Moral legitimacy is distinct from descriptive or sociological legitimacy, which is primarily concerned with how far political coercion is perceived to be legitimate by those subject to it.6 A further important distinction is offered by Buchanan, who notes that political institutions are not entities which simply coerce individuals. Criminal gangs can also be said to do that. Rather, they seek to exercise specific forms of political power, defined as “the (credible) attempt to achieve supremacy in the making, application, and enforcement of laws within a jurisdiction.”7 These characteristic attempts to achieve political supremacy are to be considered legitimate, insofar as they can be morally justified. Second, this chapter is specifically concerned with the legitimacy of, and possible duties toward, intergovernmental organizations, meaning bodies whose members are states and which are created to promote interstate cooperation on specific issues.8 These organizations can be placed on a rough 6. Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy,” 405; Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights, 112–​13; Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, eds., Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994[1919]), at 310–​11. 7. Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, 234. 8. Legitimacy concerns can also arise from the actions of other suprastate actors. See Terry Macdonald, “What’s So Special About States? Liberal Legitimacy in a Globalizing World,” Political Studies 56, no. 3 (2008): 544–​65. [ 132 ]  Luis Cabrera

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continuum of compliance powers over states, running from “purely intergovernmental” to “purely supranational.” Those at the intergovernmental end possess few formal powers of compliance. They seek to achieve supremacy in their issue areas, but they must rely on exhortation, “naming and shaming,” and similar mechanisms.9 The United Nations General Assembly, for example, has authority to issue resolutions directing member states to refrain from certain actions or to assume certain responsibilities, but it has comparatively few and weak compliance mechanisms. By contrast, supranational institutions have some robust tools to help them achieve governance supremacy.10 For example, trade rules negotiated through the World Trade Organization (WTO) are binding on member states, and the organization’s dispute resolution bodies can authorize punitive tariffs on states found to be in violation.11 Stronger still are the capacity and governance reach of a body such as the European Union. Collectively, its institutions issue directives which are binding on more than 500  million persons in twenty-​eight states, besides exercising binding legal powers and managing a common currency for seventeen member states.12 Overall, then, questions of legitimate suprastate governance should become more pressing, in roughly ascending order: a. the more persons who fall under the organization’s governance, b. the broader its scope of governance functions, c. the more autonomous its ability to set governance standards, d. and the greater its ability to pursue and obtain compliance with those standards, from states, and especially directly from individuals.13 Following these guidelines, concerns over political legitimacy in the suprastate context will likely be most salient in relation to a highly developed regional organization such as the European Union, but also to the WTO and International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as to the World Bank and UN Security Council,

9.  Emile M. Hafner-​Burton, “Sticks and Stones:  Naming and Shaming the Human Rights Enforcement Problem,” International Organization 62, no. 4 (2008): 689–​716. 10. Wayne Sandholtz and Alec Stone Sweet, “Neofunctionalism and Supranational Governance,” in Erik Jones, Anand Menon, and Stephen Weatherill, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 18–​33, at 19. 11.  See Chad P. Bown and Joost Pauwelyn, The Law, Economics, and Politics of Retaliation in WTO Dispute Settlement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 12.  Eleftheriadis, “Citizenship and Obligation”; see also Dick Leonard and Robert Taylor, The Routledge Guide to the European Union (Abingdon, UK:  Routledge, 2016). Membership would be twenty-​seven states following the exit of the United Kingdom. 13.  See also Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights, 194, for distinctions salient to legitimacy assessments of suprastate institutions. He focuses more narrowly on the coercion they exercise and whether they claim exclusive authority in a domain of governance.

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in some significant aspects. Each organization, while not seeking the comprehensive governance control that states do, has some significant means to pursue and exercise supremacy in its functional governance areas. The same considerations will be important in orienting individual duties toward suprastate institutions, but again with a key difference. That is, the stronger duties may actually be ones to promote institutional transformation or creation. There may be, for example, institutions which are currently near the intergovernmental end of the continuum but have significant potential for contributing to the moral goods which can legitimate suprastate governance. Some regional organizations such as the African Union could fall into this category, and duties to support their development could be more pressing than those toward some existing supranational institutions. Or, there may be similarly pressing duties to support the creation of supranational institutions which do not yet exist.

6.3 ASSESSING SUPRASTATE POLITICAL LEGITIMACY

Which sort of normative standard, then, should we use to assess suprastate legitimacy, and how would that conception of legitimacy relate to, and help to ground, individual duties oriented to political institutions beyond the state? We can begin to address such questions by looking to perhaps the most influential theoretical treatment of suprastate legitimacy to date, from Buchanan and Robert Keohane, and also to Simon Caney’s nuanced account.14 In Buchanan and Keohane’s version, moral dissensus and uncertainty about institutions play a significant role, ultimately serving as their justification for not seeking to specify individual duties alongside principles of suprastate legitimacy. They offer instead a general assertion that individuals “should support or at least refrain from interfering with” suprastate institutions which are assessed as legitimate in their framework.15 I will present, critically engage with, and in part draw on their account in developing a more detailed view of such individual duties. Buchanan and Keohane’s “Complex Standard of Legitimacy” for suprastate institutions features three main criteria. To be legitimate, such institutions require consent from rights-​respecting democratic states, they must provide certain goods in a way that respects basic rights, and they must be transparent in their operations.16 The first is presented as a necessary but not sufficient

14. Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy”; Caney, “Responsibilities and Legitimacy”; see also Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights, ch. 5. The latter is focused specifically on the legitimacy of international human rights institutions. 15. Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy,” 407. 16. Ibid., 432–​33; see also Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights, 189–​90. [ 134 ]  Luis Cabrera

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requirement. Suprastate institutions must have ongoing consent from rights-​ respecting democratic states, but they assert that this consent is not in itself sufficient to legitimate. That is in part because it would exclude persons in nondemocratic states, even though they also are affected by the institutions’ governance. Such consent is seen, however, as opening an important channel of democratic accountability. Buchanan and Keohane reject any claims that the consent of states per se can confer legitimacy, given that many states themselves do not meet minimum moral standards for domestic legitimacy.17 They also reject “one person, one vote” global democracy as necessary to legitimating suprastate institutions in the current global system, citing practical challenges to implementation, including the absence of global democratic institutions and a cohesive global public.18 Buchanan has argued separately, however, that global democracy would ultimately be a necessary feature of a fully legitimate global system.19 The second criterion, relating to the provision of goods, is itself composed of three standards for measuring the legitimacy of a suprastate institution. These are its minimal moral acceptability, comparative benefit, and institutional integrity.20 An institution that is minimally morally acceptable is one which does not continually violate core, or “the least controversial,” individual rights, including rights to liberty, physical security and subsistence.21 Comparative benefit refers to how far an institution can provide benefits or outputs that cannot be secured in its absence. Institutional integrity focuses on the fit between institutional performance or outputs and stated goals. If an institution routinely does not achieve its intended purpose for goods provision, then its institutional integrity and claims to legitimacy are weakened. The final main criterion for assessing legitimacy is “epistemic virtue.” An institution must be transparent enough that its insiders do not enjoy an overwhelming advantage in knowing how well it is actually meeting the three standards. This aspect is also context dependent: it requires the presence of sufficiently vigorous “external epistemic actors”22 able to engage in a critical dialogue about the institution’s legitimacy. These could be, for example, 17.  Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy,” 405; see also Caney, “Responsibilities and Legitimacy,” 98–​110. For a social contract view of suprastate governance authority that makes state consent central, see David Lake, “Rightful Rules: Authority, Order, and the Foundations of Global Governance,” International Studies Quarterly 54 (2010): 587–​613. 18. Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy,” 415–​16. 19. Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, 322–​25. 20. See also Richard Higgott and Eva Erman, “Deliberative Global Governance and the Question of Legitimacy: What Can We Learn from the WTO?” Review of International Studies 36, no. 2 (2010): 449–​70, at 460–​62. 21. Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy,”420. 22. Ibid., 430.

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watchdog groups in global civil society. In practice, Buchanan and Keohane say, this transparency will tend to stand in for the three standards. Since it is difficult for outsiders to know how effectively an institution is solving problems, living up to its own aims, etc., legitimacy is best judged in the near term by how forthcoming the institution is in response to demands for information about its operations.23 Further, they argue that it is it is difficult to know with precision when an institution is fully legitimate, given deep disagreement about moral norms. This is why their Complex Standard of Legitimacy offers a process of progressive reform, rather than a more specific rubric by which to assess legitimacy.24 Significantly, uncertainty also appears to stand as their primary reason against specifying with more precision any individual duties toward legitimate suprastate institutions. Buchanan and Keohane cite “the normative disagreement and uncertainty that characterize  .  .  .  attitudes toward these institutions” as reasons not to go beyond minimal moral acceptability and insist on a more extensive set of rights on which to ground suprastate legitimacy.25 In an earlier account, Buchanan does reference a general duty for individuals to help “support institutional efforts to secure justice for all,” in the framework of a “robust natural duty of justice.”26 But he also emphasizes global moral dissensus as reason not to insist on more than the most basic rights and corresponding duties in the near term. In addition, Buchanan has given emphasis to democratic processes as a significant means of determining political obligations. In the domestic sphere, he argues, democratic citizens have “a weighty reason to comply with the laws that emerge from democratic processes, because these processes are the best available way to express the fundamental commitment to equal regard for persons.”27 As noted, he and Keohane see little chance of establishing global democracy in the near term.28 This would give additional reason for them to defer a consideration of specific individual duties toward suprastate institutions. That is, in the absence of democratic processes, there could be even more uncertainty about the duties that individuals would have in the suprastate context.

23. Ibid., 428–​30. 24. Ibid., 433. 25. Ibid., 420. 26. Allen Buchanan, “Recognitional Legitimacy and the States System,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 28, no. 1 (1999): 46–​78. 27.  Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, 253; see also Buchanan, “Political Legitimacy,” 710–​13. 28. Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy,” 418. [ 136 ]  Luis Cabrera

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6.4 DEMOCRACY, UNCERTAINTY, AND SUPRASTATE DUTIES

Such claims can be challenged, however. I will begin by noting some problems with citing democratic equality as a strong basis for establishing or specifying duties of compliance in general—​and thus problems in rejecting the specification of duties if democratic institutions are absent. The chief problem with presuming that a commitment to equal regard means that democratic procedures should determine compliance duties is that ensuring equal input does not necessarily affirm equal regard. Those who find themselves in a persistent democratic minority can see persistently unequal outcomes, however equal their input. Such persons could justifiably be skeptical of claims that, because a persistent majority or its representatives have made a decision, they have a weighty reason to comply with it. Buchanan adds the caveat that there is no duty to comply with a democratically enacted law that itself violates equal regard,29 but it is at best unclear that this can address the concern. If equal regard is to be interpreted as primarily an entitlement to participate, then the problem has not been addressed—​participation may not represent equal regard for persistent electoral minorities. If equal regard is interpreted more broadly, to entail a range of rights protections that cannot be affected by majority decision, then duties to comply with laws would be based not in their democratically enacted character, but much more firmly in the conformity of those laws to standards of rights or justice.30 Such duties would obtain whether or not they had been democratically enacted into law, and even if there were no democratic institutions available to enact them.

6.4.1 A Rights-​B ased Approach to Legitimacy and Individual Duties

The claim here is decidedly not that democratic participation is irrelevant to an account of legitimacy or individual suprastate duties, or that it has no possible noninstrumental significance. Rather, it is that democracy is primarily of instrumental importance: its principal value and justification as a form of political rule lies in what it can help to protect and promote, rather

29.  Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, 253–​ 54; see also Thomas Christiano, The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 7. 30. See Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), ch. 14. Raz notes ways in which conformity to such principles often does more work than is immediately apparent in accounts of political obligation.

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than in intrinsic virtues of equality or autonomy that it may also embody.31 To reinforce such a claim, I will turn to the instrumental, rights-​based, “natural duties” approach, which in fact provides the underlying justification for Buchanan and Keohane’s account of political legitimacy. A similar approach, I  will argue, also appropriately informs individual duties oriented toward suprastate political institutions, even in the absence of robustly democratic institutions at the regional or global level. Such an approach begins with a presumption of the equal moral standing of individuals, typically expressed as a concern to protect their vital interests. Vital interests include familiar ones in avoiding premature death and unchosen physical harm, having adequate nourishment and access to medical care, as well as being able to exercise agency and not being subject to unjust discrimination.32 These interests are seen as essential enough to human well-​ being that they give rise to specific protective rights. Political legitimacy can be measured again according to how far political institutions uphold rights protections.33 In such a frame, the value of democracy should again be seen as primarily instrumental. Democratic processes, and also the political and legal entitlements associated with consolidated liberal democracies, can serve as tools to help protect and promote individual rights, and thus to reinforce the legitimacy of political coercion. Specific mechanisms would include voting to select representatives, and possibly some forms of referendum voting; and publicity and accountability mechanisms, including legally actionable rights to freedom of speech and of the press, rights to peaceably assemble and protest, and some legal rights to directly challenge laws, rules, or decisions with significant implications for the core rights of individuals. Each is an important

31.  See Philippe Van Parijs, in this volume, for a discussion of some social goods promoted by democratic rule, including fairer treatment of individuals and reduced enforcement costs. For a detailed defense and applications of a primarily instrumental approach to democracy, see Van Parijs, Just Democracy: The Rawls-​Machiavelli Programme (Colchester, UK: European Consortium for Political Research Press, 2011). He notes that democracy may also have some noninstrumental value, in expressing equal recognition of individuals (2011, 3). His emphasis, however, is on the instrumental design of democratic institutions to promote justice. See also Simon Caney’s chapter, this volume, section 5.4, for a discussion of Van Parijs’ approach. 32. Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy,” 419; see also Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 186; Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 72–​77; On global “natural duties of justice” corresponding to rights, see Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, 85–​98. 33.  Buchanan, “Political Legitimacy,” 703; William Talbott, Which Rights Should Be Universal? (Oxford:  Oxford University Press. 2005), ch. 7.  See also Laura Valentini, “Human Rights, Freedom, and Political Authority,” Political Theory 40, no. 5 (2012): 573–​601. [ 138 ]  Luis Cabrera

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defensive mechanism to protect against the denial of rights corresponding to vital human interests.34 Legitimacy would thus be measured primarily by the conformity of decisions and related governance outputs to rights standards. Likewise, an emphasis on rights standards would primarily ground individual duties oriented toward institutions.35 Duties would include ones to comply with laws or rules that embody a core respect for individual rights, to challenge those whose conformity to rights standards is more questionable, and, in some cases, to create new institutions capable of strengthening rights protections (as discussed later in this chapter). Here, the primary point is that democratic decision-​making does not necessarily embody the equality claimed in Buchanan and Keohane’s account, or autonomy. Thus, it cannot categorically give reason to comply with democratically enacted laws. Also, the fact that binding democracy is largely absent at the suprastate level—​with a qualified exception in the case of the European Union36—​cannot in itself be cited as a clear reason to defer or reject the consideration of more specific individual duties toward suprastate institutions and institutional development.

6.4.2 Institutional End States and Moral Uncertainty

We can begin to specify present, institutionally oriented duties through considering the sort of institutional configuration that actually could be expected to secure the moral end sought—​one which is presumed to legitimate political institutions. This “end-​state” type of approach can be contrasted with a “transitional” or comparative approach focused on more immediate aims. The latter could, for example, seek to make institutions or social relations more just in some way in the immediate term, but efforts would not be guided by a particular view of what would constitute fully just arrangements.37 The alternative 34.  See Thomas Christiano, “An Instrumental Argument for a Human Right to Democracy.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 39, no. 2 (2011): 142–​76; see also Amartya Sen, Democracy as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 6. 35.  Supplemental principles will in some cases be necessary to show why all persons have a duty to support a specific law or rule. For example, it may not be strictly necessary to coerce all persons in a jurisdiction to provide some social good for all. Compliance duties, then, could be based in a concern for fairness, seeing that all bear their fair share of the burden of securing rights protections. See Christopher Heath Wellman, “Samaritanism and the Duty to Obey the Law,” in Christopher Heath Wellman and A. John Simmons, eds., Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3–​89; Garrett Cullity, “Public Goods and Fairness,” Australian Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 1 (2008): 1–​21. 36. See Van Parijs, this volume, for some democratic problems and potential remedies in EU governance. 37. See Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (London: Penguin, 2009).

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presumption here is that some clearer vision of the end state is necessary to guide present action, to understand whether movement is actually being made toward the broader realization of moral aims over time, and to inform policy and institutional choices.38 Here, the envisioned end state would not be some system of full or “perfect” global justice. Instead, it would be a system plausibly able to promote and protect a comprehensive schedule of rights for all individuals. Duties would be oriented toward that end state, and toward developing the kinds of political institutions necessary to secure it and sustain it. Even if it is presumed that it may not be possible to fully realize the end state—​and here we can note rights-​protection gaps in even some very affluent democratic states—​the institutional end gives important guidance on selecting appropriate efforts and specifying individual duties within them. Buchanan and Keohane explicitly reject such specificity, again on grounds of moral uncertainty. They would hold suprastate institutions only to standards of minimal moral acceptability, meaning the bodies respect the “least controversial” rights, including ones to liberty, physical security, and subsistence: [I]‌n view of the normative disagreement and uncertainty that characterize our attitudes toward these institutions, it might be hard at present to justify a more extensive set of rights that all such institutions are bound to respect. It would certainly be desirable to develop a more meaningful consensus on stronger human rights standards. What this suggests is that we should require global governance institutions to respect minimal human rights, but also expect them to meet higher standards as we gain greater clarity about the scope of human rights.39

Buchanan has emphasized a similar lack of agreement on principles of distributive justice, as well as a lack of capacity to monitor state compliance, as reasons not to try to extend them globally. Suprastate institutions, he maintains, are more appropriately focused on the promotion and protection of civil and political rights, on which there is greater consensus and for which there is greater monitoring and compliance capacity.40

38. A. John Simmons, “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 38, no. 1 (2010):  5–​36. See also Laura Valentini, “Ideal vs. Non-​Ideal Theory:  A Conceptual Map,” Philosophy Compass 7, no. 9 (2012): 654–​64; and see Simon Caney, “Addressing Poverty and Climate Change: The Varieties of Social Engagement,” Ethics & International Affairs 26, no. 2 (2012): 191–​216, at 208–​10. 39. Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy,” 419. 40.  Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, 219–​30; see also Jurgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), ch. 11. For similar reasons of dissensus, Habermas sees a suprastate regional extension of distributive justice as feasible, but not a global one. [ 140 ]  Luis Cabrera

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Yet, we can note that the same sorts of dissensus issues arise domestically, and that the gulf between ideological positions can be very wide indeed. The politics of domestic redistribution, for example, remain highly contentious. Robust redistribution in various issue areas is rejected by strong social welfare conservatives, while social progressives just as vigorously reject minimal redistribution.41 Tellingly, when Buchanan separately rejects a highly welfare-​restrictive, libertarian approach for the domestic sphere, he does not do so on the grounds that it falls outside some clear domestic consensus against libertarianism. Rather, a more robust distributive scheme is said to be simply required for effective domestic citizenship, and because of the monopolistic character of domestic law. Neither condition is seen as obtaining beyond the state at present.42 That fact, however, cannot speak to whether the development of such conditions should be pursued beyond the state, as and where possible. It simply points to present institutional circumstances, while avoiding the fact of deep dissensus on principles of distributive justice domestically. Also, it likely does not take sufficient account of the similarly monopolistic nature of much EU law, and the potential for legal expansion elsewhere. Further, the claim that there is actually a broad consensus on the “least controversial” basic rights, including for suprastate institutions, would seem oversold. Consider the right to subsistence, which Buchanan and Keohane cite as one of the least controversial, and thus appropriate for some suprastate institutions to promote. It is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the binding UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, whose Article 11.2 declares a “fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger.” Yet, state signatories have diverged considerably on their interpretations of the duties corresponding to such a right. Some have rejected a duty to see that individuals are actually fed, in favor of much less specific aspirational norms.43 Such a lack of consensus exemplifies problems with expecting or demanding broad consensus in any context. That is, dissensus may simply highlight predictable challenges to ever actually securing some full consensus, domestically or in a system of sovereign states. It does not in itself give reason to reject efforts to promote the recognition of specific rights or corresponding duties. Finally, we can note also that an approach which would identify a consensus on basic rights but seek to stop there places too little emphasis on the logic of rights chains. That is, even the most basic rights will imply secondary and tertiary rights which are important to securing the basic right.44 Thus, a 41.  See, for example, Marisa Chappelle, The War on Welfare:  Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 42. Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, 196–​98. 43. Kerstin Mechlem, “Food Security and the Right to Food in the Discourse of the United Nations,” European Law Journal 10, no. 5 (2004): 641–​43. 44. Simon Caney, “Egalitarian Liberalism and Universalism,” in Anthony Simon Laden and David Owen, eds., Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge:  Cambridge

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right to physical security, even if interpreted very narrowly as a right against assault from others, will strongly imply rights to secure housing, protection provided by police and courts, and protection from potentially corrupt police and other institutional agents, which itself implies defensive rights to speech, political participation, etc. The same kinds of chains can be constructed from very basic rights to life, subsistence, and liberty.

6.5 AN INTEGRATED GLOBAL INSTITUTIONAL AIM

My own view is that an appropriate emphasis on foundational human moral equality entails the advocacy of a fairly comprehensive package of individual rights for all persons. These would include rights to more equal global access to resources and opportunities for individuals—​including rights to free movement across national boundaries in pursuit of life opportunities.45 A  defensible global system would be one in which such rights would be reliably protected for all persons. Space constraints prevent the presentation of an extended argument here for such a relatively high threshold of rights protections, but in fact, such an ideal would be broadly consistent with the progressive approach to rights-​ based legitimacy outlined by Buchanan and Keohane. That is, their account is progressive because it demands that suprastate institutions “meet higher standards as we gain greater clarity

University Press, 2007), 151–​ 72, at 154–​ 63; James W. Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights, 2nd ed. (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2007); Cabrera, “Individual Rights and the Democratic Boundary Problem,” 237–​39. Both Caney and Nickel discuss several other ways in which rights can also be seen as linked or to strongly imply one another. Elsewhere, Caney gives more emphasis to dissensus on principles of distributive justice:  “Responsibilities and Legitimacy,” 116–​18. He argues that “reasonable disagreement” about such principles should dictate that suprastate institutions be charged with protecting only the most fundamental rights for all individuals. Such an approach, however, would seem in tension with some implications of rights chains, and especially with Caney’s own persuasive arguments for forms of global equal opportunity. See Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice and Equalizing Opportunities,” Metaphilosophy 32, nos. 1–​2 (2001): 113–​34; Caney, “Justice, Borders, and the Cosmopolitan Ideal: A Reply to Two Critics,” Journal of Global Ethics 3, no. 2 (2007): 269–​76. In his chapter in this volume, Caney addresses the question of promoting global equality opportunity, though not with emphasis on moral dissensus. Rather, he argues that practical difficulties mean that we should not expect that institutions can be designed or controlled with such precision as to ensure a specific global outcome such as equal opportunity. 45.  On global equal opportunities, see Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice”; Sylvie Loriaux, “Global Equality of Opportunity:  A Proposal,” Journal of International Relations and Development 11 (2008):  1–​28; Darrell Moellendorf, Global Inequality Matters (Basingstoke, UK:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), ch. 4.  For a compelling argument advocating full global free movement in principle, see Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 11. [ 142 ]  Luis Cabrera

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about the scope of human rights.”46 Their expectation is that moral-​theory dialogue, as well as engagement by external epistemic actors in global civil society, will make clear that such institutions should protect and promote much more than the most basic rights. If this is so, then we actually have more clarity than suggested by Buchanan and Keohane about the sort of institutional configuration that would be required to reliably secure such rights globally. Specifically, a progressively higher threshold of suprastate rights recognition, protection, and promotion likely would not be possible without a corresponding process of suprastate institutional integration. In fact, numerous theorists have offered such integration claims within accounts of institutional cosmopolitanism: they have identified barriers to the realization of important moral goods which arise within a sovereign states system, and they have prescribed some forms of institutional integration to address them. Pogge, for example, highlights endemic interstate security problems, oppression within states, and the promotion of global distributive justice as reasons to support global integration. Caney focuses on chronic collective-​action problems, including “race to the bottom” dynamics in domestic labor protections and related safeguards for individuals, among other factors.47 I have emphasized interconnected domestic biases as one such type of barrier specifically inhibiting rights fulfillment in a sovereign states system. These biases include an electoral or stakeholder one, where domestic leaders have strong incentives to tend to the interests of their own constituents first.48 They also include an own-​case bias, arising as states are left to be the judges of their own obligations in a global system lacking a neutral suprastate judge or forum where salient decisions can be challenged from outside, and 46. Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy,” 419. 47.  Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, ch. 7; Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, 150–​64; Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice and Institutional Design,” Social Theory and Practice 32 (2006): 725–​56. See also David V. Axelsen, “The State Made Me Do It: How Anti-​Cosmopolitanism Is Created by the State,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 21, no. 4 (2013): 451–​72; Shmuel Nili, “Who’s Afraid of a World State? A Global Sovereign and the Statist-​Cosmopolitan Debate,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 18, no. 3 (2015): 241–​63; David Copp, “International Justice and the Basic Needs Principle,” in Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, eds., The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 39–​54; Henry Shue, “Mediating Duties,” Ethics 98, no. 4 (1988): 687–​704. Shue identifies duties to create institutions, including international ones, in part as a means of helping to effectively and fairly allocate individual duties corresponding to human rights; see also Miriam Ronzoni, “The Global Order:  A Case of Background Justice? A  Practice-​Dependent Account,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 37, no. 3 (2009): 229–​56. 48. See Luis Cabrera, Political Theory of Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State (London: Routledge, 2004), ch. 4; Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, 169. Buchanan and Keohane identify a broadly similar “tendency of democratic governments to disregard the interests and preferences of those outside their own publics,” “Legitimacy,” 434. See also Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights, 214.

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which has robust compliance powers. Such biases are reinforced by inward-​ looking media, by myriad forms of “banal nationalism,”49 and other domestic dynamics naturally arising in a states system.50 Each serves to reinforce a “separate but equal” fiduciary view of the global system, where states and state leadership are seen as equally responsible for promoting the interests and rights of their own populations, however varied their capacity to actually do so; and where they are seen as bearing only very limited duties toward other states’ populations. Regional and ultimately global integration, as feasible, would be aimed at expanding the sets of persons whose interests and rights are viewed as appropriately protected and promoted in common. It would also be aimed at expanding political participation and accountability, for the instrumental reasons noted previously. Such a view of the institutional end point would challenge Buchanan and Keohane’s claim that the role which particular suprastate institutions “ought to play in a more just world order is . . . probably not knowable at present.”51 The claim here is not that all possible institutional details can be worked out in advance. Rather, working to conceptualize an institutional system which could plausibly ensure core rights protections for all persons, while also ensuring sufficient compliance with corresponding duties, will give considerable guidance for present institutional aims and duties. Likewise, we need not presume that every detail of an individual rights scheme can be settled in advance in order to commit to more than the most minimal rights provision. Important categories of rights can be specified in some detail. This idea is familiar in the domestic context from dialogue on issues such as affirmative action. Policies in that category reflect an underlying commitment to individual equality, including to appropriately equal opportunities. That commitment, however, does not in itself fill in correct policy emphases or all institutional and implementation details. It does not answer, for example, whether the “reservation” quota policies prevalent in India best fulfill the commitment, or whether some other approach should be adopted.52 The category and underlying rights principles can be specified,

49. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: SAGE, 1995). 50.  Cabrera, Political Theory, ch. 4; Luis Cabrera, The Practice of Global Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chs. 2–​3; on a similar Lockean “own-​ case” bias internationally, see Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, 293–​99. See also Daniel Deudney’s chapter, this volume, for an argument focusing in part on how globalization now can be said to have made all persons “insiders.” The claim I am defending is that individuals should view themselves as “global insiders” in moral terms, but most do not, and the structure of the system itself reinforces tendencies toward the latter. 51.  Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy,” 435; see also Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, 67. 52.  Ashok Acharya, “Affirmative Action for Disadvantaged Groups:  A Cross-​ Constitutional Study of India and the US,” in Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 267–​94. [ 144 ]  Luis Cabrera

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however, providing significant guidance for the further specification of rights and their corresponding duties within the category. The instrumental approach defended here would in fact be strongly consistent with calls for such dialogue on more fully specifying rights and duties. That is, one of the instrumental reasons justifying democratic governance is that leaders cannot be presumed to be all-​knowing.53 Public dialogue and mechanisms of accountability also are crucial for providing broader input on contentious issues, including in the rights context. They can provide appropriately inclusive sets of insights into the kinds of rights to be protected within categories, their interpretation, their adjudication in hard cases, their enactment in legislation, and their enforcement by institutional agents. As Caney discusses in his chapter in this volume, the sort of open dialogue associated with consolidated democracies can also bring important clarity to conceptions of rights in relation to suprastate institutions. Principles underlying the broad categories of rights would provide the framework rubric for legitimacy and set some limits to majoritarian decision-​making.54

6.6 INSTITUTIONALLY ORIENTED SUPRASTATE DUTIES

What can we determine, then, about the actual content of duties oriented to suprastate institutions? What would the categories of suprastate duties be? Elsewhere, in a discussion of institutionally oriented global citizenship, I  have outlined some very broad categories of institutional advocacy duties correlating to individual rights and relevant to a conception of global citizenship.55 These include duties of interstate advocacy, to press one’s own state to fulfill appropriate aims relating to overseas aid, the accommodation of

53. Ian Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 39–​43; for a detailed treatment of some epistemic virtues of democracy, see David Estlund, Democratic Authority:  A Philosophical Framework (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); see also Van Parijs, this volume. 54.  An implication is that Caney’s account may be more fundamentally instrumental than he acknowledges. Democratic procedures are said to be required for noninstrumental reasons, but their primary role in his account is to permit individuals to give input on how a preset package of entitlements will be realized. Participants can help determine the form that entitlements may take, e.g., whether wind, solar, or some other form should realize energy entitlements. But the type and amount of entitlements all should receive appear to be determined before such procedures take place, and the procedures occur within institutions which are instrumentally designed to secure the same level of entitlements for all persons. 55.  Cabrera, Practice, 4, 80–​82. See also Caney’s instructive treatment of possible individual duties relating to severe global poverty: Simon Caney, “Global Poverty and Human Rights:  The Case for Positive Duties,” in Thomas Pogge, ed., Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 275–​302.

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immigrants’ rights, etc. They also include suprastate advocacy duties, oriented in part to promoting rights-​enhancing integration over time in the global system. Here, I will work to fill in the latter category, identifying some specific types of duties oriented to suprastate institutions in a rights-​protective instrumental approach. The discussion runs roughly from duties toward the most legitimate suprastate institutions to the least.

6.6.1 Critical Compliance Duties

The first type features duties of compliance. In practice, duties of simple obedience or compliance should be rare, if not nonexistent, since no institution can be expected to be “perfectly legitimate.” Suprastate duties of compliance should thus be conceived as ones of critical compliance:  institutions and practices which appear consistent with the rights-​protective institutional end point are to be supported critically, with an eye toward how they might be improved. This is similar to the generally critical attitude toward law and obedience advocated by such theorists as Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz, both of whom argue that laws should be assessed in part by their conformity to principles of justice.56 Buchanan and Keohane rightly open space for such critical dialogue. The distinction here is that all individuals would be expected to assume critical duties, the strength and scope of which would vary in part according to their position and their skill-​related capacities to offer effective critique. Thus, “external epistemic actors” who have specific expertise could be expected, as in Buchanan and Keohane’s account, to engage continuously and directly with a supranational organization. At the same time, nonexperts would have more general duties to contribute material support to such engagement and scrutiny, and to raise their own critical concerns with salient domestic representatives and in civil society activism. An example could be the kind of broad-​based, global activism that helped to prompt changes in World Trade Organization patent rules, helping make lower-​cost HIV/​AIDS drugs available to persons in developing countries.57 Individuals also would have duties to support and promote the rights-​ protective capacity of existing regional organizations, as well as to support trade agreements and other forms of coordination by states that could develop over time into deeper integration with rights-​enhancing potential. Such support would again be offered with a critical eye toward how all such 56. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, ch. 8; Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, ch. 14. 57. Ellen ’t Hoen, Jonathan Berger, Alexandra Calmy, and Suerie Moon, “Driving a Decade of Change: HIV/​AIDS, Patents, and Access to Medicines for All,” Journal of the International AIDS Society 14, no. 15 (2011): 1–​12. [ 146 ]  Luis Cabrera

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organizations and governance could be made more transparent and inclusive, how localized economic disruptions or dislocations could be addressed, and how the integration of mobile workers within such projects or agreements could be fairly and effectively managed. More specifically, these duties could entail near-​term support for such bodies as the European Union, given its record of contributing to the expansion of some key economic, security, democratic, and other rights, and especially its potential for further such contributions. Salient EU rights contributions include the expansion of economic and life opportunities for individuals through the granting of full free movement rights, as well as through large-​scale transfers of resources to less-​affluent areas within member states; They also include contributions to democratic consolidation and stability in newly democratized member states, mechanisms for some rights-​ based challenges beyond the state in the European Court of Justice and the EU-​affiliated European Court of Human Rights, equal costs for nondomestic university students from the EU region; and rights protections related to collective-​action problems that EU governance has contributed to solving, including environmental problems and promoting stability in a historically conflictual region. Contributions to non-​EU members would also be considered, including transfers to enhance development and democracy in prospective member states and support for integration efforts in other regions. These details do not demonstrate that the European Union has been a fully successful integration project, or fully legitimate, or indeed indicate that it will weather its particular challenges moving forward.58 Rather, they highlight some of the myriad ways in which the European “living laboratory” for integration has been and could be related to strengthening rights fulfillment. An instrumental, rights-​protective approach to individual duties would thus recommend critically oriented support for such regional integration efforts, and resistance to secession efforts such as the “Brexit” campaign, which culminated in a 52%–​48% majority of UK voters opting to leave the European Union in 2016.59 Similarly, the approach would entail support for “soft” over “hard” Brexit options, with the former aiming to maintain several aspects of deep integration with Europe and the latter to cut membership ties more definitively. Overall, the approach would support continued integration and commitment

58. For a detailed analysis of the operations, strengths of, and recent strains on the European project, see Leonard and Taylor, The Routledge Guide to the European Union. For a more critical view of the European Union and its relation to social welfare provision, see David J. Bailey, “Obstacles to ‘Social Europe,’” in P. Kennett and N. Lendvai, eds., Handbook of European Social Policy (London: Edward Elgar, 2017), 108–​25. 59. For an argument that the UK withdrawal is objectionable because all affected by it were not permitted a democratic say in the decision, see Christian F. Rostbøll and Tore Vincents Olsen, “Why Withdrawal from the European Union Is Undemocratic,” International Theory 9, no. 3 (2017): 436–​65.

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to the European project as an important potential means of strengthening its capacity to promote rights protections in the region. Near-​term, critically oriented support would also be entailed for less extensively developed institutions which have significant rights-​enhancing integration potential. These would include the African Union and its Pan-​African Parliament, Mercosur and its Parlasur parliamentary body, the System of Central American Integration (SICA) and Parlacen, and the Caribbean Community. A trade agreement that could deserve critically oriented support, and which some have seen as having potential for deeper integration over time, is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).60 I  will emphasize again that such support is understood as critical in a thoroughgoing manner. It would be consistent with much civil society criticism of aspects of regional and trade integration, including calls for reform, as per the next section. It would not be consistent with categorical demands to eliminate regional bodies or most agreements.

6.6.2 Reform Duties and Principled Resistance

Duties of reform would be closely related to those of critical compliance but would demand more stringent action. Where critical compliance would focus largely on improvements that could be made in specific rules or governing practices, duties of reform could be expected to target deeper institutional design flaws or gaps, though not ones that are so serious they would make the institution fundamentally rights-​denigrating, and thus inconsistent with the end-​state global institutional framework. Reform proposals could include, for example, the direct election of an “EU President”61 or further development of the powers of the Parliament relative to delegates of EU member states. In the longer term, reform duties would include ones to support much deeper integration and institutional development in the regional organizations noted previously, as well as reform-​ oriented support for less democratically ambitious organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Such support in all cases would be aimed at strengthening the bodies’ capacity to promote rights fulfillment, and their capacity to enable vulnerable individuals and domestic groups 60. John P. Manley, Pedro Aspe, William F. Weld, Thomas P. D’Aquino, Andrés Rozental, and Robert A. Pastor, Building a North American Community (New  York:  Council on Foreign Relations Press, 2005). The longer-​term prospects for NAFTA development have become uncertain, particularly under US President Donald Trump, who during his 2016 campaign pledged his commitment to its overhaul or abrogation by the United States. 61. Tony Blair, “It’s Time for the Direct Election of an EU President,” New Perspectives Quarterly, 30, no. 1 (2013): 18–​22. [ 148 ]  Luis Cabrera

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to better defend against rights rejections and participate in rights recognition and specification efforts. In the longer term, reform duties would include ones to support much deeper integration and institutional development in the regional organizations noted thus far. Such support would be aimed at strengthening the bodies’ capacity to promote rights fulfillment, and their capacity to enable vulnerable individuals and domestic groups to better defend against rights rejections and participate in rights recognition and definition efforts. Duties of reform also could entail duties of principled resistance, or at least the permissibility of such resistance in cases of more egregious rights violations.62 The presumption here is that, in such cases, the flaws in the design of the institution are so pronounced that they have enabled governance outcomes which may permissibly be resisted, given their subversion of rights aims. An exemplar case could be the former UN Commission on Human Rights, where it was alleged that some states were able to use their membership to shield scrutiny of their own large-​scale domestic rights violations.63 Resistance to or noncompliance with commission outputs in clear tension with rights protections could have been permissible for other states’ leaders and for civil society groups and individuals, alongside reform efforts.

6.6.3 Rejection Duties

Duties of rejection would be oriented to a suprastate institution whose design flaws are so deeply ingrained that it could not be transformed to fit the rights-​protective, end-​state framework. Such duties are incumbent when an institution or set of institutions is rights-​denigrating according to its own constituting principles. An example would be a set of institutions which constitutionally authorizes some form of apartheid, or other systems which reject fundamental moral equality. Thus, rejection duties go somewhat beyond the “moral minimum” target specified by Buchanan and Keohane, where suprastate institutions must at least uphold basic rights. Rejection duties make a further distinction between epiphenomenal rights violations tied to ineffective or corrupt governance by suprastate institutions, and violations that are more intrinsically tied to institutional design.

62.  For insights on permissible means of resisting global injustice more generally, see Simon Caney, “Responding to Global Injustice: On the Right of Resistance,” Social Philosophy and Policy 32, no. 1 (2015): 51–​73. 63.  The commission was reconstructed as the UN Human Rights Council in 2006. See Philip Alston, “Reconceiving the UN Human Rights Regime: Challenges Confronting the New UN Human Rights Council,” Melbourne Journal of International Law 7, no. 1 (2006): 185–​224.

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Such a distinction can be crucial but is often left unspecified in treatments of suprastate legitimacy. For example, Thomas Nagel, in his widely discussed account of global justice, argues that if genuinely global justice is ever to be achieved, it will require effectively a world government, and the road to that end point likely will run through unjust suprastate institutions: I believe the most likely path toward some version of global justice is through the creation of patently unjust and illegitimate global structures of power that are tolerable to the interests of the most powerful current nation states. Only in that way will institutions come into being that are worth taking over in the service of more democratic purposes, and only in that way will there be something concrete for the demand for legitimacy to work on.64

Left open here is the possibility that some fundamentally unjust institutions should be supported based solely on their ability to accrete governance power, regardless of whether they would be constitutionally incompatible with a just global system. It might be argued that we are unlikely to see any suprastate political institutions emerge which are so fundamentally unjust, or so denigrating of individual rights, that they simply cannot be reformed. Yet rejection duties also would apply when institutions are not inherently rights-​denigrating but nonetheless exhibit a clear structural tendency toward the gross underfulfillment of individual rights. This brings us back to the nature of a “separate but equal” system of independent sovereign states. The question would be whether such a system can in fact be legitimate: whether it would ensure that the core individual rights of all persons are reliably promoted and protected.65 I will reinforce first that such a system does not appear to be inherently rights-​denigrating. That is, unlike with a constitutionally authorized apartheid system,66 we can envision a formally equal global system where each state strives to promote and protect the rights of its own population, consistent with globally promulgated rights instruments such as the UN covenants. Each state would also show basic respect for the rights of those in other states, in accordance with the UN Charter.67 Even in this idealized states system, however, 64. Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 33, no. 2 (2005): 113–​47, at 146. 65. “Reliably” implies that generalizable rights protections are provided for all persons. It does not guarantee against violations in every possible case for every individual. See also Simon Caney, “Global Distributive Justice and the State,” Political Studies 56, no. 3 (2008), 487–​518, at 507–​8, for a discussion of whether the structure of a system of sovereign states may “generate or encourage” injustice (507). 66. Though see Gernot Köhler, “Global Apartheid,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 4, no. 2 (1978): 263–​75. 67.  Buchanan offers one such vision of an ideal-​type states system, where sovereign states and international human rights institutions would mutually reinforce [ 150 ]  Luis Cabrera

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there would be deep structural tendencies toward rights underfulfillment. Less-​affluent states would remain less able to protect and promote the rights of their own populations, and others would tend toward strongly prioritizing the interests of their populations. The domestic biases and other barriers noted previously would pose steep challenges to seeing the core rights of all persons actually protected and promoted. One implication of this is that institutions such as the UN General Assembly, which structurally embody or recognize strong principles of sovereignty and which do not aim to pool sovereignty, could in the longer term be candidates for rejection and replacement. The broader implication is that a system of sovereign states very likely cannot be legitimate, given its strong systemic tendencies toward rights underfulfillment, and also the ways in which its core principles tend toward limiting the mechanisms of challenge beyond the state for those facing rights violations within. Individual duties would thus be oriented toward its transformation into a system where sovereignty, or more aptly institutional supremacy in a range of governance areas, is delegated upward from states to regional and ultimately also global institutions, consistent with an overarching imperative to promote and protect the rights of all persons.68

6.6.4 Duties to Create Rights-​P rotective Suprastate Institutions

If some institutions should be rejected, others also will likely need to be created to make significant progress toward the end point. In fact, the reasons why the General Assembly could be a candidate for rejection become reasons to support the creation of a more representative body. This could come, for example, in the form of a directly elected UN second chamber, which has been the subject of numerous reform proposals.69 Individual duties here could be directed in the near term toward such efforts as the Campaign for a United

commitments to human rights protections, together meeting the criteria for “ecological legitimacy”: The Heart of Human Rights, ch. 5; on such mutual reinforcement, with some emphasis on the suprastate human rights regime which has evolved with the European Union, see Jamie Mayerfeld, The Promise of Human Rights: Constitutional Government, Democratic Legitimacy, and International Law (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); see also in this volume the chapters by Shapcott and Beardsworth, both of which seek to promote global justice within a system of sovereign states acting on appropriate governance and foreign policy principles. 68. A possible model of such integration is presented in Cabrera, Political Theory of Global Justice, ch. 5. I will note that the model is multi-​level and does not imply the elimination of states, but rather a pooling and dispersal of state sovereignty. See also Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, ch. 7; Caney, Justice Beyond Borders, ch. 5. 69.  See Andreas Bummel, Developing International Democracy:  For a Parliamentary Assembly at the United Nations (Berlin: Committee for a Democratic UN, 2010).

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Nations Parliamentary Assembly, which has in fact secured the formal support of more than 1,400 current and former members of parliament from nearly 70 countries.70 No strong claim can be made for the ultimate prospects of this campaign’s success, or for the prospects of an initially consultative UN parliament to accrete significant governing powers over time—​nor yet for the United Nations to be transformed into a body which would pool state sovereignty rather than reinforce it. In the longer term, however, such a parliamentary body could be a significant instrument for promoting better rights protections and fulfillment globally. It could be envisioned as a good fit within a comprehensive set of fully global, rights-​protective political institutions. Thus, it could be worthy of support as an institutional aim, as one instrumental means of promoting rights protections and thus enhancing global system legitimacy. I  will note that it is doubtful that duties to support a UN second chamber will be the most urgent immediate reform duties.71 More pressing would be ones to support the further development and expansion of regional organizations, as per the previous discussion, as well as to support the creation of such organizations in regions where they are lacking. Over time, however, and as feasible, duties could be focused on the creation of robustly democratic, binding global institutions which would bring “separate but equal” regional organizations into a unified framework capable of promoting rights protections globally.

6.7 CONCLUSION

I have argued here for an “end-​point,” rights-​based approach to grounding and broadly specifying individual duties oriented toward suprastate institutions. Such duties would be closely related to claims around suprastate legitimacy, where legitimacy would be measured primarily by institutions’ roles in promoting and protecting individual rights. Duties toward suprastate institutions would be determined according to the institutions’ plausible fit in a global system which could reliably protect the core rights of all persons, where “core” entails a relatively robust set of economic, civil, and political rights, including some free movement and other equal opportunity rights. I have argued that such a system likely would need to be much more comprehensively integrated than the present one, including according to the “initially minimal but progressive” approach to rights fulfillment outlined

70. Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, “About the Campaign,” 2014, http://​en.unpacampaign.org/​about/​index.php. 71. See Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice,” 731–​33; Luis Cabrera, “The Pursuit of Global Political Justice, or, What’s Global Democracy For?” in Thom Brooks, ed., New Waves in Global Justice (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 9–​28. [ 152 ]  Luis Cabrera

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by Buchanan and Keohane. Institutionally oriented suprastate duties would fall on all persons, and they would include duties of critical compliance with broadly legitimate institutions, duties to reform some suspect institutional practices or design features, and duties to resist more deeply flawed ones. They would also include duties to reject institutions which would be inherently rights-​denigrating or have a deep structural tendency to be so, and to create new institutions to play key rights-​promotion roles regionally and globally. The sovereign states system, I have suggested, is a candidate for rejection and replacement, especially if it is presumed that all individuals deserve a robust schedule of rights protection and fulfillment. Important questions remain around the actual discharge of such duties in the near term, and the specific types of institutional support, transformation, and creation that should be pursued. For example, while the overarching duty is one to help bring about the end state, or to refrain from impeding it and the rights protections which ground it, the depth and extent of subsidiary duties could vary. They could vary according to expertise and ability to contribute, and to how much others are doing to help, among numerous other factors.72 Other important questions remain about further justifying a high minimum for rights protections, and appropriately accommodating domestic or more local moral norms within a more integrated global institutional system. Such questions indicate important directions for future research.

72. See Valentini, “Ideal vs. Non-​Ideal Theory,” 656.

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CHAPTER 7

International Organizations and Democracy An Assessment MATHIA S KOENIG-​A RCHIBUGI  

7.1 INTRODUCTION

How should cosmopolitans judge existing international organizations (IOs)? This chapter examines the question by disaggregating a value that most contemporary cosmopolitans support—​ democracy—​ into distinct conceptual dimensions (section 7.3) and then surveying some of the most important empirical scholarship about the effect of IOs on each of those dimensions (section 7.4). The analysis is based on a crucial assumption, which is discussed in a preliminary step (section 7.2). In brief, there is no doubt that the approach traditionally taken by cosmopolitan theorists, comparing existing organizations with nonexistent but arguably feasible alternatives, is of critical importance for the cosmopolitan project; however, what empirical political scientists usually do, comparing actual situations of institutional “presence” with actual situations of institutional “absence,” is relevant to that project as well. The latter, “empirical,” approach faces significant methodological challenges, and cosmopolitans need to be alert to how well empirical researchers have tackled them. The rigorous studies surveyed in this chapter    I am grateful to Luis Cabrera, Jennifer Rubenstein, Thomas Pogge, Leif Wenar, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on previous versions of this chapter; meanwhile, I remain responsible for its shortcomings.

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produce sometimes unexpected findings, and on the whole, they yield a mixed picture: not only are there differences among IOs, but sometimes the same organization appears to improve one dimension of democracy while being detrimental to another. The implications for cosmopolitans are twofold. First, it is worthwhile to pay closer attention to the details of the design and operation of IOs, since even relatively modest changes in those dimensions could boost their contribution to democratization and other goals that cosmopolitans value. Second, cosmopolitans should conduct or encourage further empirical research aimed at identifying institutional designs that actually enhance several dimensions of democracy at the same time. The concluding section points at one such promising direction for future research.

7.2 TWO APPROACHES

Contemporary cosmopolitans are often ambivalent about IOs such as the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. On the one hand, both the way in which decisions are taken within such organizations and the policies that result from those decisions are often strikingly at odds with cosmopolitan principles of equal consideration of everyone’s interests. On the other hand, these organizations are living proof that conflicts of interest across borders can be addressed without recourse to what historically has been the most popular method:  war or threat of war. As such, they seem to merit support as embryonic manifestations of a future cosmopolitan world order. Perhaps this is just one of those situations in which observers can decide whether to see the glass as either half full or half empty. But it is useful to consider the ambivalence in the context of the different approaches that scholars adopt when evaluating the contribution of IOs to cosmopolitan goals. Some scholars are inclined to compare the performance of existing organizations with a broad range of alternative institutional arrangements, existing or hypothetical. This approach is probably most common among political philosophers, although by no means limited to them. A notable example is the work of Thomas Pogge, for whom “a comparative judgment is required about how well the existing institutional design does in terms of realizing human rights relative to its best feasible alternative.”1 Analyses of this kind usually find that existing institutions are deficient in comparison to an alternative that has never been realized in the actual world, but which is nevertheless

1. Thomas Pogge, Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-​Poor Rhetoric (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010), 31.

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deemed to be “feasible.”2 To be sure, it is not obvious what “feasibility” means and how it can be assessed in practice.3 But this has not prevented scholars from arguing that certain global institutional reforms are feasible as well as desirable.4 Other scholars tend to approach the assessment of IOs in a somewhat different way. For them, identifying the effect of an international institution means comparing a situation in which the institution is “there” (present, or more active) with a situation in which it is “not there” (absent, or less active). This is often the approach taken by empirical political scientists, although not always, and not only by them. In practice, scholars often compare actual but circumscribed situations of presence and absence in order to infer what a counterfactual “no institution” scenario might have been. The more limited focus on observations that exist or have existed empirically distinguishes this second approach from the first approach. In the language of possibility theory,5 this second approach relies on “data” (i.e., positive information consisting of actual observations on the world), whereas the first approach relies on “knowledge” (i.e., negative information in the sense that it expresses constraints on how the world behaves, such as physical laws or common sense). When scholars assert that a certain hypothetical institutional arrangement is feasible, they mean that is “not impossible”

2.  Notable examples of this approach can be found in Christian Barry and Thomas W. Pogge, Global Institutions and Responsibilities:  Achieving Global Justice (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2005), and Andreas Føllesdal and Thomas Pogge, eds., Real World Justice:  Grounds, Principles, Human Rights, and Social Institutions (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2005). 3.  Pablo Gilabert and Holly Lawford-​Smith, “Political Feasibility:  A Conceptual Exploration,” Political Studies 60, no. 4 (2012): 809–​25. 4.  In relation to the feasibility of global democratic reforms, see, for instance, Michael Zürn, “Democratic Governance Beyond the Nation-​ State:  The EU and Other International Institutions,” European Journal of International Relations 6, no. 2 (2000): 183–​221; Luis Cabrera, Political Theory of Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State (London: Routledge, 2004); Robert E. Goodin, “Global Democracy: In the Beginning,” International Theory 2, no. 2 (2010): 175–​209; Mathias Koenig-​Archibugi, “Global Democracy and Domestic Analogies,” in D. Archibugi, M. Koenig-​Archibugi, and R. Marchetti, eds., Global Democracy:  Normative and Empirical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 160–​82; Mathias Koenig-​Archibugi, “Is Global Democracy Possible?” European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 3 (2011): 519–​42; Daniele Archibugi and David Held, “Cosmopolitan Democracy: Paths and Agents,” Ethics & International Affairs 25, no. 4 (2011):  433–​61; Michael Zürn, “Survey Article: Four Models of a Global Order with Cosmopolitan Intent: An Empirical Assessment.” Journal of Political Philosophy 24, no. 1 (2016): 88–​119. 5. Salem Benferhat, Didier Dubois, Souhila Kaci, and Henri Prade, “Modeling Positive and Negative Information in Possibility Theory,” International Journal of Intelligent Systems 23, no. 10 (2008):  1094–​18; Didier Dubois and Henri Prade, “An Overview of the Asymmetric Bipolar Representation of Positive and Negative Information in Possibility Theory,” Fuzzy Sets and Systems 160, no. 10 (2009): 1355–​66. [ 156 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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because it is not ruled out by our knowledge, as opposed to “guaranteed possible” because it has been observed. In making moral judgments and drawing implications for individual and collective action, the first approach is certainly the most compelling. The reasons why this is so have been explained by Pogge.6 In short, the possibility that the violation of cosmopolitan values would be even more severe in the absence of certain existing institutions does not make them legitimate. To be sure, it is not easy to estimate the impact of completely hypothetical institutions or policies. For instance, claims that a ban on agricultural export subsidies might harm the world’s poorest, that the Trade-​Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement has very little impact on access to medicine in poor countries, or that development aid for health has not improved health outcomes need to be considered very seriously by advocates of major reforms in those areas.7 However, a level of uncertainty about the consequences of alternative institutional arrangements is certainly no reason to suspend debate and advocacy on them. But the findings that emerge from the second approach mentioned here are interesting not only from the point of view of academic political science. There are at least two reasons why advocates of global institutional reforms should be interested in them as well. First, some scholars and activists believe that certain existing organizations, such as the WTO, are bad for the world’s underprivileged. They are considered bad compared not only to a hypothetical trade institution based on wholly different principles, but also to a global economic system without such institutions. Abolishing an existing organization may well be politically easier than replacing it with a different, more cosmopolitan institution, and thus the no-​organization baseline becomes politically relevant in terms of strategic goal setting.8 Second, establishing whether existing IOs represent an improvement compared to a no-​organization scenario can be helpful for deciding whether

6. Pogge, Politics as Usual, 35–​50. 7.  Arvind Panagariya, “Agricultural Liberalisation and the Least Developed Countries: Six Fallacies,” The World Economy 28, no. 9 (2005): 1277–​99; Amir Attaran, “How Do Patents and Economic Policies Affect Access to Essential Medicines in Developing Countries?” Health Affairs 23, no. 3 (2004):  155–​66; Sven E. Wilson, “Chasing Success:  Health Sector Aid and Mortality,” World Development 39, no. 11 (2011): 2032–​43. 8. A survey of about 125 organizations involved in protests against the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank in 1999, 2000, and 2001 found that 35.3 percent of them believed that the WTO should be abolished and 45 percent that it needed “significant reform.” Similarly, 26 percent supported outright abolition, and 48.9 percent supported “significant reform” of the World Bank and the IMF: Patrick Gillham, Report on the Global Justice Movement Project:  Social Movement Organization Involvement in Global Justice Protests, 1999–​2001 (University of Idaho, 2007).

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such organizations are useful as stepping stones toward broader reforms, or whether alternative routes are more promising. In other words, the analysis would help strategize about possible paths to reform. But it should be noted that comparing conditions with and without existing IOs does not settle the question of whether the best path to a fully cosmopolitan world order passes through them. Such organizations may be an improvement over the no-​organization scenario and yet worsen the chances that a cosmopolitan world order may be realized, compared to the no-​organization scenario. Or, on the contrary, their activities may cause greater injustice (from a cosmopolitan perspective) and yet contribute to bringing about the conditions for the establishment of fully just global institutions.9 The implications of these possibilities for how cosmopolitans should judge existing IOs are touched upon in the concluding section. The remainder of this chapter reviews findings from political science about the effects of IOs. For reasons of space and expertise, it focuses on only one, but highly complex, value that virtually all modern cosmopolitans embrace:  democracy. It examines the relationship between this value and IOs in two steps, the first of which is primarily conceptual and the second primarily empirical. Section 7.3 will disaggregate “democracy” into a number of constituent principles. Between them, these principles cover the demos dimension (“who are the people?), as well as the kratos dimension of democracy (“how do the people rule?”). Then, section 7.4 will provide some insight into the state of empirical knowledge on the impact of IOs on each of those principles.

9. A. John Simmons points out that a nonideal theory may dictate the pursuit of the worse of two transitional conditions, if it is more likely to lead to ideal justice in the future than the better transitional condition, and especially if the latter may actually preclude ever achieving the ideal. Simmons, “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 38, no. 1 (2010): 5–​36, at 18–​25; I am grateful to Jennifer Rubenstein for prompting me to consider this issue. Simmons traces this implication of nonideal theory to John Rawls’s theory of justice, but it was already implicit in the response of some leaders of the Italian Communist Party to the increasing momentum of the Fascist movement in the early 1920s. For instance, Antonio Gramsci wrote: “It is necessary that the bourgeoisie becomes more and more reactionary, and thus clarifies for the proletariat what its true vocation is,” that is, to bring about revolution. Cited in Raffaello Uboldi, La Presa del Potere di Benito Mussolini (Milano: Mondadori, 2009, my translation), 183. This approach was known as “tanto peggio, tanto meglio,” that is, “the worse, the better.” More recently, Thomas Nagel has argued that “the global scope of justice will expand only through developments that first increase the injustice of the world by introducing effective but illegitimate institutions to which the standards of justice apply, standards by which we may hope they will eventually be transformed.” Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 33, no. 2 (2005): 113–​47, at 147. [ 158 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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7.3 ASSESSMENT CRITERIA: DIMENSIONS OF DEMOCRACY

As is well known, the Greek word δημοκρατία derives from a combination of δῆμος (demos: the commons, the people) and κράτος (kratos: rule, authority). Assessing the democratic quality of any institutional arrangement entails asking two bundles of questions. The first bundle includes questions such as these: What is a demos? What normative criteria should determine who belongs to a given demos? To what extent is the set of those who are actually included in a given demos congruent with the set of those who normatively should be included in it? In other words, how legitimate is the pattern of inclusion in and exclusion from the demos? And what factors contribute to increasing or decreasing the legitimacy gap in this dimension? The second bundle of questions includes questions such as these:  What does it mean for the people to “rule”? How severe is the gap between normative expectations of popular rule and the actual practices of rule? And what factors contribute to increasing or decreasing the legitimacy gap in this other dimension? Both the “demos question” and the “kratos question” can be addressed from a variety of different perspectives and on the basis of a wide range of assessment criteria. While the literature on conceptions or models of democracy is substantial,10 as an organizing device for the following discussion, I employ an analytical framework that is summarized in Figure 7.1. The rest of this section illustrates the various components of the framework, starting with the kratos question because it has received much more attention than the demos question. Often (but not always), authors analyzing kratos issues, theoretically or empirically, assume that the relevant demos is predefined by existing state boundaries. The aim of this exercise is to identify dimensions of democracy that existing IOs can be empirically shown to have improved or harmed. I will not examine whether some of the criteria are more important than others, or how to solve potential trade-​offs between them. Approaches to the kratos tend to focus either on how the people are involved in political rule (i.e., what can be considered input dimensions) or on 10.  See C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1977); Andrew Moravcsik, “Is There a ‘Democratic Deficit’ in World Politics? A Framework for Analysis,” in D. Held and M. Koenig-​Archibugi, eds., Global Governance and Public Accountability (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2005), 212–​39; David Held, Models of Democracy. 3rd ed. (Cambridge, UK:  Polity Press, 2006); Archon Fung, “Democratic Theory and Political Science:  A Pragmatic Method of Constructive Engagement,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 3 (2007):  443–​58; Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, Steven Fish, Allen Hicken, et al., “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach,” Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 2 (2011): 247–​67.

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Affectivity Composition Demos

Who are the people?

Are normative membership criteria fulfilled?

Performance

Is the group capable of ruling?

Do boundaries coincide with solidaristic communities?

Affectedness

Are all affected people included?

Do leaders compete for people’s votes?

Rule of the people

Input Do the people determine political decisions?

Do boundaries track shared political values?

Ethnic bonds

Do boundaries track common descent and cultural heritage?

Legal obligation Are the people subject to the law included in decisions?

Electoral contest Democracy

Civic bonds

Participation

Causal impact Are the people causally affected included in decisions?

Do people participate actively in politics?

Deliberation

Is there an exchange of reasons and meaningful dialogue?

Kratos

Do the people rule?

Freedom rights

Outcome types

Are individual freedom rights protected?

Output

Are specific decisions made?

Social justice

Are the right political decisions taken?

Outcome range Is a wide range of outcomes possible?

Figure 7.1. Dimensions of democracy considered in the present chapter.

Are social rights and economic equality promoted?

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the features of the decisions that result from the political process (i.e., the output dimensions). This also could be seen as a distinction between the way in which the people affect power-​holders and how power-​holders affect the people. Among the input dimensions, the electoral contestation dimension is stressed by the tradition in political science that draws on the understanding of democracy articulated by Joseph Schumpeter in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.11 The key criterion for assessing the democratic nature of political systems is whether governmental offices are filled as a result of free and fair elections. According to Przeworski, “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections,”12 so the crucial feature of this kind of regime is that an opposition has some chance of gaining office as a result of genuinely contested elections. Contestation requires ex ante uncertainty (the outcome of the election is not known before it takes place), ex post irreversibility (the winner of the electoral contest actually takes office) and repeatability (elections that meet the first two criteria occur at regular and known intervals). Electoral contestation among political elites has such importance for this tradition that a prominent attempt to operationalize it for empirical analysis explicitly disregards the question of the extent of popular participation: a regime can be called democratic despite very limited suffrage, as long as some conflicting interests are involved in electoral contestation.13 The participation dimension is emphasized by a different tradition, which assesses political regimes on the basis of how inclusive and intense the participation of the people in democratic rule is.14 It expects citizens to be well informed and to care about politics, and also to participate in politics not only through elections, but also in and through parties, civil society organizations, workplaces, and other settings. The key idea is that only active participation ensures that the people actually “rule” and control the sources of power affecting their lives. While usually focusing on the kratos question, proponents of the participatory conception touch upon the demos question in the sense that they value political systems where differences in participation among classes, sexes, and other social categories are minimized, but more often than not, they do not address directly the implications of their theory for politics beyond state borders.

11.  Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New  York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1942). 12.  Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market:  Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 10. 13. Mike Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, Fernando Limongi, and Adam Przeworski, “Classifying Political Regimes,” Studies in Comparative International Development 31, no. 2 (1996): 3–​36, at 19. 14.  Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1970).

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The deliberative dimension of democracy is emphasized by theoretical traditions for which democracy is not (just) about aggregating existing preferences over policies, but (also) about changing preferences through reasoned deliberation.15 The key act of participation is not voting or bargaining, but giving and considering reasons for policy proposals. Deliberation is democratic when anyone can make proposals and when proposals are accepted or rejected on the basis of the reasons given rather than the power of the proposer (what counts is the “power of the best argument”). The goal of deliberation is to reach consensus based on arguments made in terms that others can accept. For some theorists, contested elections are neither necessary nor sufficient for democracy.16 What matters is not the existence of specific institutions, but whether the deliberative system as a whole works. As Dryzek states, “In a deliberative light, the more authentic, inclusive, and consequential political deliberation is, the more democratic a political system is. Political systems (including states) can be arrayed on a continuum according to the extent of their deliberative capacity.”17 If electoral, participatory, and deliberative approaches are mostly interested in the input side of the political process, other approaches judge the quality of democracy on the basis of what the process produces. Political systems can be assessed with regard to whether and to what extent they generate specific outputs. For liberal or libertarian democrats, what matters most is the ability of the political system to constrain state (and other) agents from interfering arbitrarily in the exercise of individual freedoms. The most important freedoms are protection from torture and arbitrary imprisonment, and the freedoms of speech, association, and religion. Most controversially, some liberal democrats emphasize the importance of strong protection for private property. By contrast, social democrats are interested in the ability of the political system to mitigate economic and social inequalities and to provide social rights pertaining to subsistence, health, education, and so on. Equal access to such goods is valued either as a precondition for political equality or as an end in itself. In contrast to conceptions that mandate specific outcomes, another approach stresses the extent to which the people are effectively able to choose among a range of different policies and obtain different outcomes. Norberto Bobbio expresses this idea by stating that democracy requires that “those

15. Jon Elster, “The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory,” in J. Elster and A. Hylland, eds., Foundations of Social Choice Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 104–​32. 16. Terry Macdonald and Kate Macdonald, “Non-​electoral Accountability in Global Politics:  Strengthening Democratic Control Within the Global Garment Industry,” European Journal of International Law 17, no. 1 (2006):  89–​119; John S. Dryzek, “Democratization as Deliberative Capacity Building,” Comparative Political Studies 42, no. 11 (2009): 1379–​1402. 17. Dryzek, “Democratization,” 1380. [ 162 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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called upon to take decisions, or to elect those who are to take decisions, must be offered real alternatives.”18 In this conception, in a democracy, citizens are able to choose not only between potential leaders, but between a wide range of policy options, such as more or less redistribution of wealth among citizens, low taxes and public spending versus high taxes and public spending, austerity versus fiscal stimulus during recessions, alternative ways of prioritizing public spending (education, health, pensions, defense, etc.), social-​cultural issues such as same-​sex marriage, censorship, role of religion in the polity, multiculturalism versus assimilation of immigrants, and so forth. Political parties should be able not only to campaign on the basis of different political programs, but also to implement them if they are elected. Multidimensional understandings of the kratos dimension of democracy are possible and plausible. For instance, Coppedge et al.19 develop an extensive framework based on six conceptions, thirty-​three components, and hundreds of indicators. But trade-​offs cannot always be avoided, e.g., between antagonistic electoral contestation on the one hand and consensus-​oriented deliberation on the other (input), or between respect of “negative liberties” and property on the one hand and the promotion of social and economic equality on the other (output). As noted previously, there are extensive debates on what “rule” by the people means or should mean. By contrast, the question of who should be the relevant “people” has received less attention. List and Koenig-​Archibugi20 distinguish between two approaches to the question of the demos: the compositional approach defines the demos by providing a membership criterion, whereas the performative approach defines it in terms of the functional characteristics that it must have in order to guide decisions and enable actions on a given set of issues. The following discussion will focus on the still more common compositional approach. Terry Macdonald21 has noted that societal approaches to the constitution of the demos tend to employ two criteria for the drawing of democratic boundaries. According to the first criterion, legitimate democratic boundaries should be constituted by the scope of solidaristic relationships. Some accounts emphasize the prepolitical (cultural, social, ethnic) foundations of democratic solidarity, while others stress its inherently political character and thus the role of common decision-​making institutions and processes. According to the

18.  Norberto Bobbio, The Future of Democracy:  A Defence of the Rules of the Game (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1987), 25. See also Andreas Follesdal and Simon Hix, “Why There Is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A Response to Majone and Moravcsik,” Journal of Common Market Studies 44, no. 3 (2006): 533–​62. 19. Coppedge et al., “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy.” 20. Christian List and Mathias Koenig-​Archibugi, “Can There Be a Global Demos? An Agency-​Based Approach,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 38, no. 1 (2010): 76–​110. 21. Terry Macdonald, “Boundaries Beyond Borders: Delineating Democratic ‘Peoples’ in a Globalizing World,” Democratization 10, no. 3 (2003): 173–​94.

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second criterion, legitimate democratic boundaries should be constituted by the scope of power relationships; i.e., by the range of people over whom power is exercised by some authority within a certain jurisdiction. Some accounts stress the coercive dimension of legislative power, while others refer to a broader conception of being affected by decisions. As Macdonald notes, “[I]‌n the past historical era of territorial nation-​states, the solidaristic boundaries of national communities have (at least to a significant degree) been aligned with the jurisdictional boundaries of sovereign power within a bounded territorial state.”22 As a result of a widespread perception of congruence between the two, democratic theorists of the past did not feel compelled to discuss the normative priority of solidarity or power in the legitimation of democratic boundaries. Without prejudicing the question of whether such a congruence assumption was ever plausible in the first place, it is safe to say that today, we have no valid reason to presuppose that the democratic boundaries identified as legitimate on the basis of actual solidarity relationships will coincide with those identified as legitimate on the basis of actual power relationships. Thus, we have to decide which criterion for the assessment of existing boundaries deserves priority:  (a) the extent to which those who are subject to power have the ability to participate in the exercise of that power; and (b) the extent to which the boundaries between decision-​makers and others coincide with solidaristic communities linked by some kind of affective bond. List and Koenig-​Archibugi23 refer to the two criteria as “affectedness” and “affectivity.” It is not clear whether cosmopolitans would want to consider the affectivity criterion at all. At least some cosmopolitans, such as Goodin, maintain that “[i]‌t is arbitrary, from a moral point of view, to whom we happen to feel sentimentally attached or with whom we happen to share a common history or ancestry. What makes those factors matter, in ways that justify constituting our demoi around them, is the way that those factors lead to people’s interests being intertwined.  .  .  .”24 Most cosmopolitans would probably support the notion that being subject to a power creates participatory entitlements with regard to the exercise of that power. But this abstract criterion can be made more specific in various ways. Some support the principle that, as Robert Dahl put it nearly fifty years ago, “everyone who is affected by the decisions of a government should have the right to participate in that government.”25 Hence, as Habermas states, “[d]eficits in democratic legitimation arise whenever the set

22. Macdonald, “Boundaries,” 174–​75. 23. List and Koenig-​Archibugi, “Can There Be a Global Demos?,” 80–​81. 24.  Robert E. Goodin, “Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 35, no. 1 (2007): 40–​68, at 48. 25.  Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? Authority in a Good Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 64. [ 164 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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of those involved in making democratic decisions fails to coincide with the set of those affected by them.”26 Goodin demonstrates that the most coherent interpretation of the “all affected” principle requires the inclusion in the demos of every interest that might possibly (or probably) be affected by any possible decision arising out of any possible agenda. A  popular alternative to the “all affected” principle is the “all subjected” principle: everyone who is bound to obey the laws of a government should have the right to participate in making those laws, and no one else.27 Two criteria will be applied in the following survey: 1. Do IOs improve or worsen the ability of those causally affected by a decision to participate in making that decision, directly or through representatives? In other words, do they increase or decrease the overlap between those who are affected by decisions and those who can influence those decisions? 2. Do IOs improve or worsen the ability of those obliged to obey certain laws to participate in creating those laws, directly or through representatives? Do they increase or decrease the overlap between those who are subject to laws and those who have a say in making those laws?28 26. Jürgen Habermas, Time of Transitions (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006), 78, emphasis removed. 27.  Sofia Näsström, “The Challenge of the All-​Affected Principle,” Political Studies 59, no. 1 (2011): 116–​34. See also Mathias Koenig‐Archibugi, “Fuzzy Citizenship in Global Society,” Journal of Political Philosophy 20, no. 4 (2012): 456–​80, which bridges the general all affected principle and the all subjected principle. Building on Goodin’s interpretation, it argues that, since the content of decisions cannot be used to determine participatory entitlements, the only legitimate basis for doing so is the degree of power resources in the possession of the decider. Those who are directly subjected to the coercion-​backed authority of a state (generally because they reside within the jurisdictional boundaries of that state) should have full and extensive participation rights. People over whom a given state has no authority (nonsubjects) find themselves in a different position: they have a high probability of being significantly affected by decisions of that particular state only if the state has substantial power resources. The more resource-​rich a state (or other decision-​making unit) is, the more people living outside its jurisdiction should be permitted to influence its decisions. See also Mathias Koenig-​Archibugi, “How to Diagnose Democratic Deficits in Global Politics: The Use of the “All Affected Principle,” International Theory 9, no. 2 (2017): 171–​202. 28. It should be stressed that these criteria are not exhaustive of the positions on the demos question. For instance, Terry Macdonald maintains that participatory entitlements are due to individuals “only in relation to those forms of power that impact in problematic ways upon their autonomy”: Global Stakeholder Democracy: Power and Representation Beyond Liberal States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 41. Arash Abizadeh maintains that everyone who is subject to coercion should have the right to participate in decisions regarding the exercise of that coercion: “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion:  No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders, Political Theory 36, no. 1 (2008): 37–​65. Coercion is a subset of affectedness and overlaps with the obligation to obey laws (effective coercion without legal obligation is possible, and vice versa). Luis Cabrera has developed a theoretical alternative to those intrinsic approaches to democratic boundaries by stressing inclusion rules that improve

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7.4. INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AND DEMOCRACY: SOME EVIDENCE 7.4.1 Methodological Preliminaries

The aim of this section is to review existing empirical research on the relationship between IOs and democracy. Given the large number of studies on this topic, this survey does not aim to be comprehensive, but to provide a road map that should be useful to cosmopolitans when they consider the implications of reforming or abolishing existing IOs.29 The focus will be on quantitative research, to the neglect of small-​N and other qualitative studies. This choice stems from the aims of the chapter: to provide a sense of the general impact of certain IOs; i.e., average effects and general trends across populations of cases. Statistical analysis is particularly well suited to identify whether IOs have an effect on average, and in which direction it goes. By contrast, case studies are invaluable for identifying causal mechanisms; i.e., explanations of why such effects exist and how IOs produce them. Moreover, the explanation of specific instances of IOs influencing events in a specific context, such as a regime in a particular country, requires in-​depth investigation, as general patterns identified by statistical analysis cannot be used to reach conclusions about specific observations. So an important caveat is that the main focus of the following overview is not why IOs have an effect, or what the effect is in a particular place and time, but only what the effect is in the population of cases that are relevant to the analysis. Like all forms of social research, quantitative analyses have to address the so-​called fundamental problem of causal inference: Identifying a causal relationship involves stating that y would have been different (absent, present, higher, lower, etc.) if x had been different (absent, present, higher, lower,

rights protection. From this perspective, the question to be asked in our context would be whether the presence or absence of existing IOs matters for making democratic boundaries more or less “rights-​friendly.” See Luis Cabrera, “Individual Rights and the Democratic Boundary Problem,” International Theory 6, no. 2 (2014): 224–​54. A possible example would be the extent to which the UN High Commissioner for Refugees can prevent refugees from being forcibly repatriated to conflict zones, which is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the acquisition of civil, social, and ultimately political rights in receiving countries. 29.  Because of space constraints, some strands of the literature on IOs must be ignored here. For instance, Bueno de Mesquita and Downs show that targets of military intervention by the United Nations experience reductions in democratic reform relative to the counterfactual base case of no intervention. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs, “Intervention and Democracy,” International Organization 60, no. 3 (2006): 627–​49. Judith Green Kelley provides evidence that incumbents are substantially more likely to lose elections when rigorous election monitors sent by IOs are present. Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works, and Why It Often Fails (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). [ 166 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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etc.), but we can observe only the actual world in which x and y have certain values. Quantitative scholars have developed a number of techniques for making plausible counterfactual statements about causality (such as “All else being equal, political repression in county A would have been milder if it had not been involved in an IMF conditional lending program”) in the absence of experiments. Quantitative analyses of the effects of IOs usually exploit variations across cases and/​or across time. They tend to compare member-​states of IOs with nonmembers, countries that have ratified treaties with countries that have not, participants in IO programs with nonparticipants, recipients of larger amounts of IO financing with recipients of lower amounts, countries that hosted IO missions (e.g., as electoral observers) with countries with no missions, and so on. Importantly, many analyses compare a state when it is a member/​participant/​recipient/​host with the same state when it is not. A common problem of this kind of analysis is that involvement with IOs is often not random. For instance, if recipients of IMF lending are shown to have higher levels of political repression than other states, it may be due to the fact that countries that request IMF loans are under greater economic stress than the others, and this greater stress would have led to repression regardless of whether the IMF had intervened. Statisticians have developed a number of techniques to address the problem of this so-​called selection effect. One common approach is the use of selection models:  In the first stage, the researcher estimates the probability that each state will display the condition of interest (e.g., participation in an IMF program) based on a model that includes the theoretically most plausible determinants; in the second stage, a transformation of the those predicted probabilities is incorporated as an additional explanatory variable in a model that aims to explain the outcome of interest (e.g., the extent of political repression). In the example given here, taking into account differences in the probability of joining an IMF program allows the researcher to identify the distinctive effect of IMF programs on political repression. Another approach is propensity score matching, which attempts to mimic randomization by selecting a sample of states displaying the condition of interest (i.e., IMF program participation) that is as similar as possible in all observed covariates to a sample of states that did not display the condition. Causal attribution is thus improved by pairing a “treated” case with a very similar “untreated” case. These approaches are used to reduce biases in addressing the key issue for most empirical researchers that has been mentioned here:  comparing a situation in which the institution is “there” (present, or active) with a situation in which it is “not there” (absent, or inactive), all else being equal and on the basis of empirical data. I will now discuss each of the dimensions of democracy mentioned in section 7.3 in turn. I n t e r n at i o n a l Or g a n i z at i o n s a n d De m o c r ac y  

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7.4.2 Electoral Contestation

The role of the European Union (EU) in promoting the democratization of Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe is a much researched topic, and these is wide agreement that the prospect of attaining and retaining EU membership played a role in the political development of those countries.30 Case study research has suggested that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) played a role in democratic consolidation in Central and Eastern Europe as well.31 Pevehouse32 has conducted the most systematic analysis of the role of regional IOs in democratization by theorizing on the causal mechanisms linking this type of IO to domestic political change and conducting statistical analyses of all regions of the world. In brief, Pevehouse hypothesizes that membership in regional IOs make democratic transition and consolidation more likely because they function as channels of external pressure; they reassure elite groups that their interests will be protected in a democratic regime; they change the normative orientation of key groups such as the military; and more generally, they give legitimacy to new democratic governments. Pevehouse’s statistical analysis finds that membership in a larger number of regional IOs increases both the chances of a transition to democracy and the likelihood of its survival, and that the effect is clearest and strongest for IOs that have a higher proportion of democracies as members. His findings are especially relevant for the electoral contestation dimension of democracy, since the outcome variable is based on the Polity project, which combines measures of the competitiveness and openness of executive recruitment, constraints on executive power, and competitiveness of political participation into a score that ranges from –​10 to +10.33 Another important quantitative study of the influence of IOs on electoral democracy is by Torfason and Ingram.34 They consider the argument that IOs in 30.  Geoffrey Pridham, Encouraging Democracy:  The International Context of Regime Transition in Southern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Geoffrey Pridham, Designing Democracy:  EU Enlargement and Regime Change in Post-​Communist Europe (Basingstoke, UK:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Ulrich Sedelmeier, “The EU and Democratization in Central and Southeastern Europe since 1989,” in S. Ramet, ed., Central and Southeast European Politics Since 1989 (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), 519–​35. 31. Rachel A. Epstein, “NATO Enlargement and the Spread of Democracy: Evidence and Expectations,” Security Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 63–​105. 32.  Jon C. Pevehouse, Democracy from Above:  Regional Organizations and Democratization (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also Paul Poast and Johannes Urpelainen, “How International Organizations Support Democratization:  Preventing Authoritarian Reversals or Promoting Consolidation?” World Politics 67, no. 1 (2015): 72–​113. 33. Monty G. Marshall, Keith Jaggers, and Ted Robert Gurr, Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800–​2003 (2005). 34.  Magnus Thor Torfason and Paul Ingram, “The Global Rise of Democracy:  A Network Account,” American Sociological Review 75, no. 3 (2010): 355–​77. [ 168 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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general, i.e., not only regional IOs, are key agents in the worldwide diffusion of the norm that democracy is the only legitimate form of government, by facilitating interaction among elites, but also the development of common values among the publics of the member-​states. They tested it quantitatively by examining nearly all states in the world since 1816 and their connections through joint memberships in IOs. The analysis includes hundreds of IOs, some of which were devoted to the promotion of democratic practices, but most of which dealt with other issues, such as environmental protection, trade promotion, or cultural cooperation. Using advanced statistical methods, Torfason and Ingram found that states that share IO membership with countries with higher levels of Polity scores tend to become more similar to their comembers in terms of levels of Polity scores. Also, the total number of IOs of which a state is a member has a positive influence on its Polity score. Figure 7.2 shows the result of a simulation that Torfason and Ingram conducted on the basis of actual quantitative data, controlling for a wide range of determinants of democracy. The upper line tracks closely the actual average level of the Polity score of all countries in the world in a given year. The lower line shows the average Polity score of the world in a statistical simulation where the effect of the positive influence on democracy through the IO network is artificially restricted to zero. The graph also shows confidence intervals (c.i.) around the lines. This counterfactual analysis shows that the IO network made a four-​point difference in global Polity scores, which, as the authors note, equals almost the entire change associated with the so-​called third wave of democratization, which occurred between 1970

Democracy level (POLITY2)

6 4 2 0 –2 –4 –6 1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

Year Actual democracy level/Reference simulation Restriced simulation omitting positive diffusion

90% c.i. of reference simulation 90% c.i. of restricted simulation

Figure 7.2. Simulation of democracy levels with and without diffusion effects through IOs.

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and 2000. They conclude that “the [intergovernmental organization] network has been fundamental to global democratization.”35 Of course, the finding that more connections through IOs on average make electorally contested regimes more likely to emerge and survive does tell us little about specific IOs. Torfason and Ingram find that diffusion through IOs with extensive bureaucracies is statistically significant, while diffusion through minimally structured IOs is not. They also find that diffusion through economic IOs is statistically significant, whereas the effect of diffusion through social and cultural IOs, while positive, is not statistically significant. However, they warn readers that the very high correlation between the two variables (.98) makes it difficult to say whether the difference between economic and social/​cultural IOs is only apparent or real. In any case, there may be a high level of variation within the categories of economic and social/​ cultural, with some IOs promoting and others harming the electoral dimension of democracy within each category. For this reason, it is important to examine specific IOs. The big three economic multilaterals, the IMF, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/​WTO, have attracted the most attention from activists, commentators, and researchers. It is often asserted that IMF and World Bank conditional lending contributes to the survival of authoritarian regimes and to the destabilization of regimes with competitive elections.36 While this assertion may be correct in specific cases,37 the statistical literature does not find this to be true on average. A path-​breaking analysis by Abouharb and Cingranelli covering all developing countries between 1981 and 2003 and addressing selection effects38 shows that countries that have been under World Bank or IMF structural adjustment conditionality the longest have higher Polity scores than countries with less exposure to structural adjustment conditionality. They also have elections that are freer and fairer, more freedom to form and join organizations, and more freedom of speech and press, according to a large-​scale coding exercise based mainly on US State Department country reports. Nelson and Wallace apply genetic matching, instrumental variables, and difference-​in-​differences techniques to 120 developing countries observed

35. Torfason and Ingram, “The Global Rise,” 373. 36. Ron Paul, “Legislation to Withdraw the United States from the Bretton Woods Agreement.” Congressional Record:  Proceedings and Debates from the 108th Congress. First Session 149, no. 14 (2003): 18738; Eric Toussaint, World Bank—​IMF Support to Dictatorships (Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, 2004). Available at http://​cadtm.org/​World-​Bank-​IMF-​support-​to (accessed January 5, 2015). 37. See David Pion-​Berlin, “Political Repression and Economic Doctrines: The Case of Argentina,” Comparative Political Studies 16, no. 1 (1983): 37–​66. 38.  Rodwan M. Abouharb and David L. Cingranelli, Human Rights and Structural Adjustment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). [ 170 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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between 1971 and 2007, and they reach similar conclusions.39 They find that IMF lending programs slightly improve the Polity score of countries (as well as an index that combines Freedom House ratings on political rights and civil liberties). They explain this finding in part by suggesting that autocrats living under IMF programs tend to shift resources from the security forces, which in turn erodes their ability to repress prodemocracy opposition forces. Birchler, Limpach, and Michaelowa find that lending by the World Bank and the IMF positively affects democratization when it takes the form of “poverty reduction strategy” (PRS) programs, which incorporate process conditionality emphasizing country ownership and civil society participation.40 A similar positive effect on electoral contestation has been found for GATT⁄WTO. Aaronson and Abouharb consider all countries in the world and find that countries that have been GATT⁄WTO members for longer periods tend to have greater levels of oppositional political competition (the variable Competitiveness of Participation from the Polity project) and freer and fairer elections.41 Taking into account the main factors that influence GATT/​ WTO membership in the first place, “the probability that governments fully respect the rights to free and fair elections progressively improves the longer they have been members of GATT⁄WTO regime from 0.25 for those countries which are not members of the GATT⁄WTO to 0.50 for those which have been members the longest, a 100% increased probability.”42

7.4.3 Participation

The fact that IOs such as the IMF and the World Bank increase the likelihood that governmental offices are filled as a result of contested elections does not necessarily mean that they improve the quality of participation, at least in countries that already have contested elections. It is the executive branch of government that conducts negotiations with the IMF and the World Bank, and this privileged position can be used by executives to circumvent elected legislatures and weaken their influence on the policy process and its outcomes. Part of the reason for this is that negotiations are usually conducted behind

39.  Stephen C. Nelson and Geoffrey P.  R. Wallace, “Are IMF Lending Programs Good or Bad for Democracy?” The Review of International Organizations 12, no. 4 (2017): 523–​58. 40. Kassandra Birchler, Sophia Limpach, and Katharina Michaelowa, “Aid Modalities Matter: The Impact of Different World Bank and IMF Programs on Democratization in Developing Countries,” International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2016): 427–​39. 41. Susan Ariel Aaronson and M. Rodwan Abouharb, “Unexpected Bedfellows: The GATT, the WTO, and Some Democratic Rights,” International Studies Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2009): 379–​408. 42. Ibid., 402.

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closed doors, and the agreements reached with the IMF usually do not formally require parliamentary ratification because they are not international treaties. Even when parliaments are asked to approve legislation needed to implement an agreement, they often are faced with a “take it or leave it” situation. James Vreeland found some statistical evidence of this effect: governments that face a larger number of “veto players,” i.e., institutional and partisan actors whose agreement is needed for policy change, are more likely to enter into an IMF arrangement than countries with fewer veto players.43 The argument that executives use negotiations with the IMF to strengthen their hand domestically is supported by case studies such as Vreeland’s analysis of President Luis Alberto Lacalle Herrera’s efforts to introduce wide-​ranging economic reforms in Uruguay in the early 1990s against intense opposition from some parliamentarians, trade unions, and other interest groups.44 This line of reasoning can be extended to other IOs. It can be argued that such an insulating effect is not a mere by-​product of the decision to involve IOs in policymaking, but one of its purposes—​a mechanism that can be understood as one of “collusive delegation.”45 By helping increase the autonomy of executives vis-​à-​vis other political and societal actors, IOs are said to have a major de-​democratizing effect.46 However, other authors defend IOs from the charge of removing policy issues from the domain of participatory politics. They argue that that at least some IOs help neutralize “wrong,” i.e., undemocratic, forms of participation: mobilization by narrow sectoral groups whose interests are in conflict with the broader public interest and have strong incentives and ability to mobilize to protect them. Keohane, Macedo, and Moravcsik develop a sustained defense of such an argument:  “Multilateral institutions such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), WTO, and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) provide mechanisms by which democratic publics can limit the influence of minority factions by committing in advance to a set of multilateral rules and practices that reflect broad public interests.”47 More generally, according to Moravcsik, executives are typically responsive to a broader range of interests compared to the pressure groups that dominate channels of 43. James Vreeland, The International Monetary Fund: Politics of Conditional Lending (London: Routledge, 2006). 44.  James Vreeland, “Why Do Governments and the IMF Enter into Agreements? Statistically Selected Cases,” International Political Science Review 24, no. 3 (2003): 321–​43. 45. Mathias Koenig-​Archibugi, “International Governance as New Raison d’État? The Case of the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy,” European Journal of International Relations 10, no. 2 (2004): 147–​88. 46. Klaus Dieter Wolf, “The New Raison d’État as a Problem for Democracy in World Society,” European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 3 (1999): 333–​63. 47.  Robert O. Keohane, Stephen Macedo, and Andrew Moravcsik, “Democracy-​ Enhancing Multilateralism,” International Organization 63, no. 1 (2009): 1–​31, at 11. [ 172 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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political representation in democratic states. Considering that national arenas often privilege particularistic interests over general but diffuse interests, “the insulation of national executives from domestic rent-​seeking groups not only facilitates international cooperation, it can also be justified as a more broadly ‘representative’ outcome than direct democracy would generate.”48 In a similar vein, Miles Kahler argues, “Paradoxically, ‘opening’ the WTO to a wider array of interests in the name of accountability might make negotiation outcomes less representative of the interests of the electorate as a whole.”49

7.4.4 Deliberation

Keohane, Macedo, and Moravcsik also argue, “The wider scope, greater diversity, expert staffs, and political insulation of multilateral forums can enhance the epistemic basis of political decision making by expanding the range of information available to national politicians and publics . . . When information and critical insights are generated and utilized more effectively, democracy is improved.”50 They cite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a multilateral institution that has improved the quality of domestic deliberation on climate change. Do these examples reflect a broader trend? It is difficult to assess the impact of IOs on the quality of public deliberation in a wide range of settings. IMF negotiations provide the most plausible counterexample to the optimistic view since, as Kapur and Naim note, “By their very nature, IMF conditions arise not from debate and discussion within a society, but come rather from unelected foreign experts.”51 There is arguably great variation among IOs, but there are also reasons to believe that IOs systematically improve one particular dimension of deliberation; i.e., public access to information that is relevant for public policymaking. Alexandru Grigorescu examines the presence or absence of laws supporting domestic government transparency in forty-​nine consolidating democracies between 1995 and 2001, and finds that countries with greater levels of information flows from seventeen IOs to societal actors were more likely to adopt government transparency laws than those with less

48. Andrew Moravcsik, Why the European Community Strengthens the State: Domestic Politics and International Cooperation, CES Working Paper no. 52 (1994), 56. Available at http://​aei.pitt.edu/​9151/​. 49. Miles Kahler, “Defining Accountability Up: The Global Economic Multilaterals,” in D. Held and M. Koenig-​Archibugi, eds., Global Governance and Public Accountability (Cambridge: Blackwell), 8–​34, at 18 (italics in original). 50. Keohane, Macedo and Moravcsik, “Democracy-​Enhancing Multilateralism,” 18. 51. Devesh Kapur and Moises Naim, “The IMF and Democratic Governance,” Journal of Democracy 16, no. 1 (2005): 89–​102, at 91.

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intense flows.52 Grigorescu argues, “As international organizations release more information directly to societal actors, the domestic press often uses the incoming information as a basis for its criticism of the government. It is due to such criticism that governmental elites might decide that they need to send signals of increased transparency to regain their lost credibility.”53

7.4.5 Protection of Personal Freedom Rights

Keohane et al. argue that multilateral human rights treaties and international adjudication mechanisms have helped protect human rights against infringements in established and newer democracies. They point to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its court as the most developed system, and note that “[j]‌udgments have been enforced against torture in Northern Ireland, discrimination against homosexuals in the British military, privacy rights violations in Switzerland, arbitrary detention in Russia and several other former Soviet states, restriction of religious rights in Moldova, and incarceration of journalists in Turkey, among other violations.”54 While the ECHR system is complex and multifaceted, on the whole, the argument that is has benefited the liberties advocated by liberal democrats is convincing. For instance, not only has the European Court of Human Rights become increasingly progressive with regard to the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals (LGBT), but there is also strong evidence that the court rulings themselves caused the adoption of pro-​LGBT policy reforms in the member-​states of the Council of Europe, rather than merely following preexisting legal and social trends.55 But how generalizable is the experience of the ECHR to other human rights treaties? The quantitative literature on the effectiveness of human rights treaties and institutions typically asks whether countries that ratified a treaty are more compliant with the rights it protects than nonratifying countries. The findings have been sobering. Several studies found no difference in human rights practices between ratifiers and nonratifiers, or even that abuses

52.  Alexandru Grigorescu, “International Organizations and Government Transparency: Linking the International and Domestic Realms,” International Studies Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2003):  643–​67. Grigorescu operationalizes information flows from IOs to societal actors as the product of the total number of news releases and communiqués issued about a country by the seventeen IOs, and the level of press freedom in that country. 53. Ibid., 654. 54. Keohane et al., “Democracy-​Enhancing Multilateralism,” 16. 55.  Laurence R. Helfer and Erik Voeten, “International Courts as Agents of Legal Change: Evidence from LGBT Rights in Europe,” International Organization 68, no. 1 (2013): 77–​110. [ 174 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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worsened in countries following ratification.56 Other studies found that ratification had some positive effects on human rights practices, but only in countries that had favorable domestic conditions—​notably democratic institutions and judicial effectiveness.57 In a recent study that accounts for selection effects (i.e., the possibility that abusive governments are either less or more likely to ratify human rights treaties), Cole finds that the effect of the treaties depends on the level of commitment that states make.58 States that authorize the Committee Against Torture to receive interstate and individual complaints show higher levels of respect for physical integrity rights than other states, whereas mere ratification of the Convention Against Torture, without submission to the optional monitoring and enforcement mechanism, has no effect. Cole’s physical integrity rights index is constructed by counting the instances of torture, political imprisonment, extrajudicial killing, and disappearances that were reported in each country in a given year. Likewise, states that allowed oversight bodies to receive complaints of abuse from individuals by ratifying the First Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) have better levels of respect for basic empowerment rights such as the right to vote and the freedoms of speech, assembly and religion, whereas mere ratification of the ICCPR does not improve practices. States that ratified the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination were less likely than nonparties to discriminate, and states that accepted the interstate complaints provisions discriminated even less; but acceptance of individual complaints provisions perversely led to increased levels of discrimination against minority groups. However, Cole also shows that ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) fails to improve respect for women’s social, economic, and political rights, regardless of whether its interstate complaints procedure is accepted.

56.  Oona A. Hathaway, “Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?” Yale Law Journal 111, no. 8 (2002): 1935–​2042; Emilie M. Hafner-​Burton and Kiyoteru Tsutsui, “Human Rights in a Globalizing World:  The Paradox of Empty Promises,” American Journal of Sociology 110, no. 5 (2005): 1373–​411. 57.  Todd Landman, Protecting Human Rights:  A Comparative Study (Washington, DC:  Georgetown University Press, 2005); Eric Neumayer, “Do International Human Rights Treaties Improve Respect for Human Rights?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 6 (2005): 925–​53; Emilia Justyna Powell and Jeffrey K. Staton, “Domestic Judicial Institutions and Human Rights Treaty Violation,” International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2009): 149–​74; Beth A. Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 58.  Wade M. Cole, “Human Rights as Myth and Ceremony? Reevaluating the Effectiveness of Human Rights Treaties, 1981–​2007,” American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 4 (2012): 1131–​71.

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What about the economic multilaterals? As we have seen previously, Abouharb and Cingranelli find a positive effect of IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs on the Polity score and on measures of free and fair elections, freedom to form and join organizations, and freedom of speech and the press.59 Interestingly, they find opposite effects when they consider some other basic individual freedom rights that are highly valued by liberal democrats—​and not only by them. They show that antigovernment demonstrations, riots, and organized rebellions occur more often in the wake of structural adjustment programs, and that governments often respond to these challenges to their authority by increasing repression. Taking into account selection effects, Abouharb and Cingranelli find that governments that spent greater periods of time under structural adjustment programs scored worse on the composite physical integrity rights index mentioned before. All else being equal, if a structural adjustment program is agreed and implemented in a country, the probability that torture occurs there increases from 5 percent to 31 percent.60

7.4.6 Promotion of Social Rights and Economic Equality

The policy orientations of IOs are sometimes divided into “neoliberal” and “social.” IOs that have traditionally espoused neoliberal approaches, such as the IMF and the WTO, embody the belief that liberalization, deregulation, and reduction of the public sector are usually the most effective means of alleviating poverty and promoting economic growth. By contrast, social IOs such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) stress the role that public regulation plays in shifting the balance of economic power from stronger actors, such as employers and the wealthy, to weaker actors, such as workers and the poor. Quantitative research has provided support for the widespread view that IMF programs hurt the poor. Taking into account selection effects, Przeworksi and Vreeland,61 and Vreeland,62 show that IMF programs harmed the least well off in two ways:  They typically slowed economic growth in recipient countries without helping them in the long run; and they usually worsened inequality in the distribution of national income, proxied by the labor share in manufacturing. 59. Abouharb and Cingranelli, Human Rights and Structural Adjustment. 60.  Rodwan M. Abouharb and David L. Cingranelli, “The Human Rights Effects of World Bank Structural Adjustment, 1981–​2000,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 2 (2006): 233–​62. 61. Adam Przeworski and James Raymond Vreeland, “The Effect of IMF Programs on Economic Growth,” Journal of Development Economics 62, no. 2 (2000): 385–​421. 62.  James Raymond Vreeland, “The Effect of IMF Programs on Labor,” World Development 30, no. 1 (2002): 121–​39. [ 176 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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Detraz and Peksen show that IMF programs deteriorate the level of respect for women’s economic rights (while having no discernible effect on women’s political rights).63 Abouharb and Cingranelli64 find that the longer a country has been under a World Bank or IMF structural adjustment agreement, the less its government respects core workers’ rights in the formal economy, i.e., freedom of association, the right to collective bargaining, the elimination of forced or compulsory labor, the abolition of child labor, and acceptable conditions of work with respect to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health. They also find that structural adjustment agreements have negative effects on a physical quality of life index with three components: infant mortality rates, life expectancy at age one year, and the adult literacy rate. Stuckler et al.65 find that among twenty-​one postcommunist countries, participation in an IMF program was associated with increased tuberculosis incidence, prevalence, and mortality rates by 13.9  percent, 13.2  percent, and 16.6 percent, respectively. They interpret this as an effect of weaker healthcare infrastructure resulting from IMF-​mandated austerity policies. However, an analysis of a large number of low-​income countries made by IMF economists shows that contrary to widespread beliefs, IMF programs slightly increase spending for health and education.66 If the “neoliberal” IMF tended to have adverse effects on the interests of disadvantaged sectors of the populations of debtor countries, what is the impact of “social” IOs? Ratification of ILO conventions shows mixed results. Countries that have ratified more ILO conventions on unemployment benefits tend to spend more on unemployment benefits.67 The ratification of ILO conventions on social protection also increases other forms of welfare spending (health, old age, invalidity, and maternity), but only in richer countries.68 But there is no evidence that countries that ratified the relevant ILO conventions have higher respect for trade union rights, higher unionization rates, fewer child workers and higher school attendance, or fewer cases of

63.  Nicole Detraz and Dursun Peksen. “The Effect of IMF Programs on Women’s Economic and Political Rights,” International Interactions 42, no. 1 (2016): 81–​105. 64. Abouharb and Cingranelli, Human Rights and Structural Adjustment. 65. David Stuckler, Lawrence P. King, and Sanjay Basu, “International Monetary Fund Programs and Tuberculosis Outcomes in Post-​Communist Countries,” PLoS Medicine 5, no. 7 (2008): e143. 66.  Benedict Clements, Sanjeev Gupta, and Masahiro Nozaki, “What Happens to Social Spending in IMF-​Supported Programmes?” Applied Economics 45, no. 28 (2013): 4022–​33. 67.  Wonik Kim, “The Ratification of ILO Conventions and the Provision of Unemployment Benefits:  An Empirical Analysis,” International Social Security Review 63, no. 1 (2010): 37–​55. 68. David Strang and Patricia Mei Yin Chang, “The International Labor Organization and the Welfare State: Institutional Effects on National Welfare Spending, 1960–​80,” International Organization 47, no. 2 (1993): 235–​62.

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forced labor.69 This suggests that social IOs are not strong enough to counterbalance the detrimental social impact of neoliberal IOs.

7.4.7 Provision of Real Policy Alternatives

It is widely believed that the involvement of IOs in domestic policymaking has reduced the ability of democratic publics to choose among alternative policy proposals. For instance, an evaluation study conducted by the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network (SAPRIN) claims that “while procedural democracy has been promoted  .  .  .  real democratic choice for both civil society and governments in the arena of economic policy has been severely limited by the [international financial institutions] and their Northern Board members.”70 This argument is difficult to assess empirically because such an assessment depends on a prior solution to fundamental conceptual issues about the nature of political choice. At one level, IOs intentionally steer governments away from certain policies and toward others. This is clearest in the case of the IMF, which uses its bargaining power vis-​à-​vis crisis-​stricken governments and their publics to make loans conditional on specific government actions (liberalization, privatization, expenditure reductions, etc.) ostensibly aimed at increasing the country’s ability to repay the loans and prevent the recurrence of crises. At another level, even an intrusive IO such as the IMF can be seen as not reducing the options available to governments, but adding to the existing set of options another one (IMF financing plus conditions) that the government is “free” to choose or not.71 Even more than the other criteria for assessment used in this chapter, the answer depends on prior philosophical decisions, notably (a) how coercive limitations on freedom are conceptualized 69. Matthias Busse and Sebastian Braun, “Trade and Investment Effects of Forced Labour: An Empirical Assessment,” International Labour Review 142, no. 1 (2003): 49–​ 71; Eric Neumayer and Indra de Soysa, “Globalization and the Right to Free Association and Collective Bargaining:  An Empirical Analysis,” World Development 34, no. 1 (2006): 31–​49; Nathan D. Martin and David Brady, “Workers of the Less Developed World Unite? A  Multilevel Analysis of Unionization in Less Developed Countries,” American Sociological Review 72, no. 4 (2007): 562–​84; Bernhard Boockmann, “The Effect of ILO Minimum Age Conventions on Child Labor and School Attendance: Evidence from Aggregate and Individual-​Level Data,” World Development 38, no. 5 (2010): 679–​ 92. See also Dursun Peksen and Robert G. Blanton, “The impact of ILO conventions on worker rights: Are empty promises worse than no promises?” Review of International Organizations 12, no. 1 (2017): 75–​94. 70.  Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network (SAPRIN), Structural Adjustment: The SAPRIN Report: The Policy Roots of Economic Crisis, Poverty, and Inequality (London: Zed Books), 221. 71.  Kendall W. Stiles, “IMF Conditionality:  Coercion or Compromise?” World Development 18, no. 7 (1990): 959–​74. [ 178 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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and (b) how the appropriate counterfactuals are constructed.72 I highlight this issue as one where further research is particularly necessary.

7.4.8 Inclusion of Affected People

Governments and other actors frequently make policy decisions that affect people who are outside their formal jurisdiction, however “decision” and “affecting” are understood. Do existing IOs increase opportunities for such people, or their representatives, to influence the content of those decisions? There are strong reasons to respond in the affirmative. The domain of trade provides a useful illustration of such effects. Governments, especially those controlling access to large markets, make numerous decisions that affect the economic well-​being of producers and consumers around the world, such as decreasing or raising tariffs and nontariff barriers to trade, increasing or eliminating subsidies to domestic producers, and choosing between strict and lax protection of intellectual property rights. By joining IOs such as GATT and the WTO, states in effect give up the legal right to make some trade policy decisions unilaterally and crucially grant foreign producers a right to compensation, which is implemented through the organizations’ dispute resolution procedures. Davis provides an interesting example of this effect by contrasting the case of Vietnamese catfish exporters, who were hit by US government labeling and antidumping policies that discriminated against their products in the American market; and Peruvian exporters of scallops and sardines, which faced similar EU labeling policies that discriminated against their products in the EU market.73 Peruvian groups were much more effective than Vietnamese groups in influencing the policies that harmed them, and the crucial difference between them was that Peru was a WTO member and thus was able to participate in two WTO disputes against the offending policies, whereas Vietnam was not a member, and its bilateral trade agreement with the United States proved to be an insufficient instrument of influence. The argument that existing IOs give affected interests a say can be generalized to many policy domains. One example is international conflicts about sovereignty rights over a specific piece of land, and ownership or usage rights of a maritime area or a river that crosses state boundaries. Decisions by governments on such issues clearly affect people in other countries, not 72.  Laura Valentini, Justice in a Globalized World:  A Normative Framework (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 73. Christina L. Davis, “Do WTO Rules Create a Level Playing Field? Lessons from the Experience of Peru and Vietnam,” in J. S. Odell, ed., Negotiating Trade: Developing Countries in the WTO and NAFTA (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006), 219–​56.

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only in relation to the specific territory, area, or river in question, but because disagreements over them have a high potential of escalating into armed conflict. Mitchell and Hensel examine all main territorial claims between 1816 to 2001 and all main maritime and river claims between 1900 and 2001.74 They find that states are more likely to reach an agreement settling their contentious issues when arbitration and adjudication by international institutions are involved than when they are negotiated bilaterally or with the help of noninstitutional third parties. Moreover, states are more likely to comply with agreements reached with the help of arbitration and adjudication by international institutions than agreements reached in other ways. Interestingly, international institutions also matter when they are not directly engaged in solving the specific issue in question since agreements are more likely to be struck and compliance rates are significantly higher when the parties in the dispute share memberships in a larger number of international institutions that explicitly promote the peaceful settlement of conflicts among member-​states. Other studies confirm that IOs improve the peaceful resolution of international conflicts.75 These findings are especially important considering that they involve situations not just of “affectedness” but more specifically of “coercion,” which—​as noted earlier—​some authors consider the proper criterion for determining who has a right to democratic inclusion. Improving the ability of people in one country to influence another country’s decisions that affect them is a necessary but not sufficient yardstick for assessing the performance of an IO in relation to the affectedness criterion. In addition, the IO should achieve that without worsening the already large inequalities of political influence among persons around the world. In the example of the WTO, we need to ask whether the increased influence given to people in poor countries over the trade policies of rich-​country governments is not attained at the expense of an even-​larger increase of influence of people in rich countries over the trade policies of poor-​country governments. It is certainly the case that the major economic powers are by far the most frequent users of the WTO dispute settlement mechanism. This may be a sign that the system discriminates against countries that are less powerful and have less legal capacity. Examining all WTO member-​state dyads from 1995 to 2003, Sattler and Bernauer find that larger economies are more likely to become involved in trade disputes primarily because their economies are more diversified and 74.  Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and Paul R Hensel, “International Institutions and Compliance with Agreements,” American Journal of Political Science 51, no. 4 (2007): 721–​37. 75.  Han Dorussen and Hugh Ward, “Intergovernmental Organizations and the Kantian Peace:  A Network Perspective,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 2 (2008): 189–​212. [ 180 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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their larger markets make them more attractive targets of litigation, whereas legal capacity does not seem to play a role.76 However, they also found that “[d]‌yads with larger differences in power between complainant and defendant—​in either direction—​are less likely to become involved in a WTO dispute. This power preponderance effect suggests that more powerful countries may obtain concessions from less powerful countries outside the WTO, and/​or that less powerful countries may abstain from formal WTO litigation for fear of reprisals.”77 In other words, the WTO system does less to improve the voice opportunities to external affected interests precisely in those cases where they would be needed most. But this is the case because states retain the ability to settle cases outside the WTO framework. These examples are based on the assumption that governments represent their citizens when they try to influence the policies of powerful outsiders. Such an assumption would of course be unwarranted in many circumstances. The argument that representation by governments is insufficient to ensure democratic representation is one of the foundations of the widespread view that the participation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in IO policymaking increases its democratic quality.78 But even in the case of a democratically legitimate government that represents its citizens reasonably well, the idea that IOs increase the say of citizens can be disputed. For instance, Dahl argues that because of a fundamental trade-​off between citizen participation and scale of government, knowledge of and participation by ordinary citizens in IOs is bound to be limited,79 and “we should openly recognize that international decision-​making will not be democratic.”80 However, it is not clear that the loss of participatory quality cannot be compensated for by an increase in influence on decisions that affect citizens. As Dahl himself argued a quarter of a century earlier, democracy requires not only “citizen effectiveness,” but also “system capacity,” that is, the polity’s ability to respond to the collective preferences of its citizens. Hence, a “rational or reasonable democrat who wished to maximize the chances of attaining certain of his

76.  Thomas Sattler and Thomas Bernauer, “Gravitation or Discrimination? Determinants of Litigation in the World Trade Organisation,” European Journal of Political Research 50, no. 2 (2011): 143–​67. 77. Ibid., 144. 78. Jan Aart Scholte, ed., Building Global Democracy? Civil Society and Accountable Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jonas Tallberg, Thomas Sommerer, Theresa Squatrito, and Christer Jönsson, The Opening Up of International Organizations:  Transnational Access in Global Governance (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013). 79. Robert A. Dahl, “Can International Organizations Be Democratic? A Skeptic’s View,” in I. Shapiro and C. Hacker-​Cordón, eds., Democracy’s Edges (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999), 19–​36. 80. Ibid., 23.

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goals might well trade some loss of personal effectiveness for some gain in the capacity of the system to attain them.”81 In some cases, it may be impossible or very costly to prevent decisions made in one independent jurisdiction from affecting the welfare of people in other jurisdictions—​the emission of greenhouse gases is a clear example of “unavoidable” globalization. In such cases, a “reasonable democrat” may well judge that the overall level of popular control would be higher under a political arrangement where individual citizens have a weak influence on a fairly effective IO than under a political arrangement where individual citizens have a stronger influence on a state that cannot use IOs to influence other states.

7.4.9 Inclusion of Subjected People

As noted previously, an alternative to the criterion of affected interests is the criterion that people who have an obligation to comply with a law should have the opportunity to influence the content of that law, either directly or through representatives. Do existing IOs ameliorate or exacerbate the gap between legal obligation, on the one hand, and participatory opportunities, on the other hand? In principle, international law itself could be a source of such a gap. In practice, this may be rare. First, most international laws are binding on states (and their citizens) only when they consent to them, for instance through ratification. To be sure, citizens of undemocratic states may have little input into the ratification decisions of their governments, but in such cases, the source of the gap is located in domestic political structures rather than in IOs. Second, sometimes binding international law is adopted by majority vote and governments (democratic or not) are outvoted, but the normative principle in question is most plausibly interpreted as requiring people to have a vote, not a veto. The UN Security Council is probably the most problematic case where people could be legally obliged to comply with rules in relation to which they did not have any kind of input, because it is questionable that elected, nonpermanent members can be said to represent nonmembers of the UN Security Council, and especially because of the preponderant influence of permanent, veto-​ wielding members. So it is a particularly severe challenge to the all-​subjected principle that since the 1990s, and especially since the 9/​11 terrorist attacks, the UN Security Council has imposed sanctions against named individuals, with almost no guarantee of due process.82 81. Robert A. Dahl and Edward R. Tufte, Size and Democracy: The Politics of the Smaller European Democracies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973), 23. 82. Nico Krisch, Beyond Constitutionalism: The Pluralist Structure of Postnational Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). [ 182 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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If IOs only rarely make the gap between legal obligation and participation worse, do they sometimes ameliorate it? One positive example would be the role of the United Nations in speeding up decolonization. Colonial rule is a particularly egregious violation of the principle that people subjected to laws should participate in creating those laws. The decline of colonialism over the course of the twentieth century was due to a variety of factors, one of which was a discursive process that occurred within the United Nations and elsewhere. Decolonization resulted in part from “a fundamental shift of normative ideas and a corresponding change of mind on the part of most sovereign governments and the public opinion influencing them concerning the right to sovereign statehood.”83 The process that Neta Crawford describes as the “denormalization” of colonialism84 unfolded partly in international forums and culminated in the landmark Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, approved by the UN General Assembly in 1960. According to the event history analysis of decolonization performed by Strang,85 the estimated transition rate from dependent to sovereign status was almost six times faster after the Declaration than before, controlling for other factors.

7.5 CONCLUSION

The preceding survey of the empirical scholarship about the effects of IOs on various dimensions of democracy yields a mixed picture: not only are there differences among organizations, but sometimes the same organization appears to improve a dimension of democracy while being detrimental to another. We can detect a few patterns, however. The first is not surprising. In order to have an impact at all, IOs need resources, whether of a material, organizational, or legal nature. This emerges from Torfason and Ingram’s finding that only IOs with extensive bureaucracies are channels of diffusion of electoral democracy; Cole’s finding that ratification of key human rights treaties improves human rights practices only in states that have submitted to optional monitoring and enforcement mechanisms; and the contrast between

83. Robert H. Jackson, “The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization: Normative Change in International Relations,” in J. Goldstein and R. O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1993), 111–​38, at 129. 84. Neta C. Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 85. David Strang, “From Dependency to Sovereignty: An Event History Analysis of Decolonization, 1870–​1987,” American Sociological Review 55, no. 6 (1990):  846–​60, at 854.

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well-​resourced economic IOs such as the World Bank and the IMF and the weaker ILO. The second pattern is less expected. The activities of the arguably more powerful economic IOs—​the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO—​seem to improve the input dimension of democracy, or at least the Schumpeterian features of domestic political systems (political and electoral contestation). On the other hand, involvement with the World Bank and the IMF seems to have a detrimental impact on most output criteria that have been considered: torture, political imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, disappearances, core workers’ rights, inequality in the distribution of national income, and various human development indicators. These findings suggest two conjectures that are especially deserving of investigation from a cosmopolitan moral perspective. The first conjecture is that the beneficial impacts of IOs are due primarily to the channels of communication that they open (diffusion of democratic norms, transparency of governments, transnational interactions of officials and civil society groups, etc.), whereas the detrimental effects are due primarily to the content of the policies that some IOs have promoted, specifically those associated with neoliberalism and the so-​called Washington consensus. If this conjecture is accurate, then there would be reason for institutional cosmopolitans to be optimistic since the content of policies is arguably a more contingent and transient feature of IOs than their structural linkages with states and societies. The second conjecture is that IOs that perform better on what we called the “demos” aspects—​by helping affected or subjected people to influence decisions in a relatively equal and symmetric way—​also perform better with regard to what we called the “kratos” aspects. For instance, more egalitarian and/​or accessible IOs may help prevent the imposition of policies that are preferred by the governments of richer countries (for reasons of interest or ideology), but that have democracy-​harming social impacts on poorer countries. However plausible it may seem at first sight, this conjecture is difficult to assess in a conceptually and empirically rigorous way.86 But a thorough examination of it could offer an important contribution to strengthening the empirical foundations of current debates about cosmopolitan institutional design. While the empirical approach taken in this chapter brings benefits, its limitations should be kept in mind. As noted in section 7.2, comparing conditions with and without existing IOs does not settle the question of whether the best path to a fully cosmopolitan world order passes through them. The studies surveyed in this chapter and future research on the two conjectures mentioned here can give cosmopolitans pro tanto reasons to assess specific

86. Ongoing research by Daniele Archibugi tackles an important dimension of this conjecture. [ 184 ]  Mathias Koenig-Archibugi

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international organizations favorably or not, but they are insufficient for an all things considered judgment.87 Since progress toward emancipatory goals often takes unexpected twists and turns, identifying “all relevant things” may well be beyond the capacity of social science. Not least for that reason, the other approach mentioned at the beginning of this chapter—​comparing existing organizations with nonexistent but arguably feasible alternatives—​rightly remains central to the institutional cosmopolitan project.

87. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this way of characterizing the issue.

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III

Cosmopolitan Institutions, from City to World State

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CHAPTER 8

Global Justice at the Municipal Scale The Case of Medellín, Colombia FONNA FORMAN AND TEDDY CRUZ  

8.1 INTRODUCTION

Cities are increasingly on the front lines of global justice, asserting themselves as “sanctuaries,” protectors of human rights, and leaders of diverse egalitarian agendas—​responding to accelerating global migration, dramatic urbanization, climate change, and increasing nationalist hostility to diverse and vulnerable groups. As such, cities and municipalities are often the most immediate institutional facilitators of global justice on the ground. Cosmopolitans and other theorists interested in global justice need to consider the increasing importance of cities, and the correspondences between global theories and local actions. Obviously, local institutions continue to be perpetrators of horrific human rights violation and social injustice across the globe, too often insulated from    Our great thanks to Alejandro Echeverri, Sergio Fajardo, and Antanas Mockus for sharing their time and insights about the political and civic processes we explore in this chapter. Their generosity and friendship have been our greatest resource. We are grateful as well for conversations with Carlos Uribe, Jorge Blandón, Ana Ochoa, David Escobar Arango, Maria Carla Echeverría Ramírez, César Hernández, Camilo Restrepo, Paula Restrepo, Rubén Fernandez, Camilo Castro, Rafael Abaud Lopez, Jeihhco, Luisa Fernanda Botero, Juan Sebastian Bustamante, Daniel Cavalho, Natalia Castaño Cardenas, Ximena Covaleda, Alvaro Morales Rios, Miguel Robles-​ Durán, Edgar Pieterse, Bill Morrish, and Francisco Sanin. For comments on evolving iterations of these ideas, our sincere thanks go to Gerry Mackie, Brooke Ackerly, Luis Cabrera, Jim Tully, Rainer Forst, and Darrel Moellendorf. Thanks as well to Brendan Finney, Alicia Boswell, and Maria Atuesta for their research assistance at various points.

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scrutiny on a larger scale. Rogue municipalities, like rogue nations, should be condemned. The particularities of local history and practice should never trump universal human rights norms. But in this chapter, we want to focus more constructively on the ways that some municipalities have embraced and stewarded the mandates of global justice and improved the quality of life for the most vulnerable demographics, often more responsively and effectively than national or global institutions can. Proximity matters, and cosmopolitan thinkers interested in institutions and urgent, real-​world interventions and impacts need to take note of what cities are positioned to do. This chapter asks that we critically engage with the assumption that “global” is a spatial concept that refers to challenges “out there” as the appropriate site of action—​and that we refocus instead on global challenges “right here”—​ wherever “right here” happens to be. If global justice demands urgent action, then we must consider the role of institutions closest to the ground. Our localist focus here does not diminish the role of international institutions, international cooperation and dialogue, or the articulation of universal goals, mandates, and aspirations. Our emphasis on local action is not a claim that institutions at local or regional scales should be left to go it alone, without the support, knowledge, or resources of institutions at broader scales. Effective local action needs external resources and support. It also needs transcendent norms and a comparative framework that can provide criteria for action and benchmarks for success. From the perspective of global justice and the need for urgent interventions to remediate human suffering, it is essential that we forge new bidirectional flows between global and local knowledges, imperatives, resources, capacities, and actions. Institutions need to learn to incorporate practical knowledge on the ground, and this extends to global institutions and actors as well. Exploring these correspondences is a large and important project—​how the top-​down and the bottom-​up need to converge in their knowledges and strategies to confront poverty and injustice across the globe.1 Facilitating this interface between institutions and the experience of practitioners on the ground should be a central component in any development strategy. In this chapter, however, our goals are more modest. Here, we will explore the role that municipalities can play in interpreting and executing the mandates of global justice and mobilizing rapid and effective actions to address urgent deprivations at the scale of cities and regions. We will offer a way of thinking about the cosmopolitan or global city not as a gentrified and

1.  For further discussion on the convergences of the top-​down and bottom-​up, see Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz, “Changing Practices:  Engaging Informal Public Demands,” in Peter Mörtenböck, Helge Mooshammer, Teddy Cruz, and Fonna Forman, eds., Informal Market Worlds: Reader: The Architecture of Economic Pressure (Rotterdam, Netherlands: nai010 Publishers, 2015). [ 190 ]  Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz

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commodified buffet of cultural offerings, but as a site of local governance that actually would be consistent with egalitarian, cosmopolitan, moral aims. Referring to the municipality as an agent of global justice may seem strange to those who associate global justice with cosmopolitan imperatives to transcend local sites of loyalty and action—​to be critical of arbitrary jurisdictional divides that prioritize the familiar and too often marginalize the unknown poor and powerless across the globe. We are sympathetic with this cosmopolitan position, and we view local insularity, exception, and myopic self-​ preference among the greatest threats to a safer, more humane, and equitable planet. But in this chapter, we would like to consider global justice as a scalable concept in which institutions of governance on any scale can do the following: 1. Take a stand against inequality and prioritize its reduction over other political goals. 2. Develop egalitarian (rather than closed, hierarchical, and antidemocratic) processes of governance. 3. Deploy egalitarian interventions in the poorest, most marginalized zones (rather than the most prosperous ones, the typical sites of economic development). We argue that institutions of governance at any scale—​municipal, state, national, regional, or international—​can be evaluated along these three egalitarian registers as agents of global justice in their priorities and actions and can achieve ends that benefit the least well off rather than exclusively the most. The scale of global action under consideration in this chapter is the city, and the beneficiaries of these egalitarian commitments are the inhabitants of the city, which may seem contrary to the cosmopolitan aspirations of global justice. But our goal here is to develop a grounded practice of global justice and to create a space for committed municipalities as agents of intervention at the front lines. We are inspired by a growing literature in political theory that explores the idea of global justice as it manifests as a set of grounded practices stewarded by local activists in pursuit of global egalitarian ends—​forms of a globalization from below, or what Lea Ypi characterizes as “ ‘avant garde’ political agency.2 We see our work moving very much in this vein. We want to advance the idea of “global justice on the municipal scale” and to show how cities can articulate priorities and produce ends that further the mandates of global justice along three registers: 1. Municipalities can articulate egalitarian priorities to reduce poverty and urban asymmetry as they frame public policy and planning. 2. Lea Ypi, Global Justice and Avant Garde Political Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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2. Municipalities can institutionalize egalitarian processes of governance by tackling corruption, increasing transparency, and coordinating collaboration across sectors. 3. Municipalities can redirect capital investment from the predictable zones of urban development toward the poorest and most marginalized zones, so that municipal interventions themselves can produce egalitarian ends at the scale of the city. Our normative argument is grounded in empirical cases that we have studied, where cities have activated egalitarian priorities that manifested in a reduction of poverty and urban violence and an improvement in the quality of life of the urban poor. Drawing on practical activity to advance normative claims is an example of an emerging area of political theory called “grounded normative theory.” Grounded normative theorists believe that normative theories of social justice need to be informed by practices on the ground, and they can become epistemically arrogant when they lose touch with the people whom they claim to be representing. The normative theorist gains access and understanding of real-​world practices by engaging with the practitioners themselves, as we have done here through many years of partnership with the actors in the empirical case studies that we draw upon.3 Nevertheless, while we are inspired by these successful cases, it is important to state clearly that in this chapter, we are not making an empirical or practical argument about what works and what does not work to fight poverty in cities. The empirical impact of the priorities and interventions we describe here is not essential to the theoretical claim we are making: that a city can orient its priorities, governance structures, and interventions around the mandates of global justice. A well-​intended city can fail in its goals, for a great variety of reasons, just as well-​intended global institutions can fail in their goals (as they often do). Failure does not diminish the theoretical significance of an institution’s priorities and interventions. Failure does not negate the claim that cities and other subglobal institutions can orient themselves around the priorities of global justice, and that they should be included in an account of institutional cosmopolitanism. Interventions that fail to hit their mark can be improved over time. That is a practical problem. Our argument here is a conceptual one:  that cities (because of their capacity to prioritize one set of commitments over another and their capacity to advance certain interventions rather than others) must be understood

3. For an extensive discussion and use of grounded normative theory methods, see Brooke Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); see also Luis Cabrera, The Practice of Global Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). [ 192 ]  Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz

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as potential agents of global justice. That some cities have been extraordinarily successful provides the reason why global justice scholars should consider them.

8.2 THE GLOBAL CITY

References to “the global city” abound in scholarship on the city today. This formulation has been advanced by both enthusiasts and critics to describe today’s megacity as the epicenter of financial power and influence, as the site of global flows and diverse identities where the particularities of time and place dissolve in the rapid movement of money, people, information, ideas, disease, and fashion. From the egalitarian perspective on global justice advanced in this chapter, the global city has physicalized perhaps the greediest variant of capitalism the world has ever witnessed, producing a corrupt, oil-​ hungry urbanization marked by unsustainable sprawl, hyperconsumerism and private debt, a severe lack of affordable housing and public infrastructure, a dramatic explosion of slums on the urban periphery introducing unprecedented disparities between wealth and poverty, and a general decimation of public culture. The global city counters precisely the egalitarian, or cosmopolitan, model of urbanization that we are advancing in this chapter. Political and moral theorists have been slow to address the possibility of a “cosmopolitan urbanism.” The formulation has not been considered, likely because cosmopolitanism is associated with expanding ethical concerns beyond the local. A preoccupation with urban or civic affairs seems to run counter to cosmopolitan aspirations, which are global in scope. But urban geographers have been investigating the “cosmopolitan city” for decades, and in a variety of ways. Sometimes the idea is used to describe cities that reach beyond themselves, partnering with other cities, states, and regions, for purposes of economic or environmental development or more progressive public agendas. Sometimes “cosmopolitan city” has referred to the diverse, multicultural urban demographics produced by the movement of peoples and the opening of new spaces of encounter between cultures.4 These “mongrel cities” are ethnically and racially diverse and identity-​friendly and open-​minded, and they associate cosmopolitanism with a sensibility enacted in a local setting. As urbanist Ulrich Beck warned, however, cultivating respect for the other in our new multicultural cities does not always translate into ethical commitment to equality or social justice, or “stimulate a feeling of

4. Exemplary here is Craig Young, Martina Diep, and Stephanie Drabble, “Living with Difference? The ‘Cosmopolitan City’ and Urban Reimagining in Manchester,” Urban Studies 43, no. 10 (2006): 1687–​1714.

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cosmopolitan responsibility.”5 Cosmopolitan cities are often neutral on issues of social equity, devoid of ethical content, and susceptible to the machinations of municipalities seeking to attract capital investment, and private developers who ethnicize and gentrify immigrant neighborhoods, displacing communities and their microeconomies with ethnic restaurants, boutiques, and housing developments that cater to an enlightened and worldly cosmopolitan elite.6 As Beck states: Cosmopolitanism itself has become a commodity; the glitter of cultural difference fetches a good price. Images of an in-​between world, of the black body, exotic beauty, exotic music, exotic food, and so on are globally cannibalized, re-​ staged, and consumed as products for mass markets.7

And it is not uncommon to witness these commodified cosmopolitan sensibilities facilitated by developers into a branding campaign, existing cynically side by side with overt racial and socioeconomic discrimination and exclusion.8 While both the collaborative and multicultural variants of urban cosmopolitanism have potential salience for egalitarian outcomes, most frequently, these developments have been hijacked by private interests rather than stewarded in a socially responsible direction in pursuit of egalitarian ends. Political neutrality, thus, becomes complicity. Our cosmopolitan argument here is very different. We are drawing on a long tradition of thinking in the Western philosophical tradition that demands that we take a broader view of ourselves, place ethical constraints on our narrow self-​preference, and expand the scope of moral responsibility to the stranger, the unfamiliar, the powerless, the underrepresented, and the least well-​off. In this chapter, we argue that this expansion of moral responsibility can take place on any scale—​from the village to the globe—​and that the municipality can be more or less cosmopolitan in its commitment to social justice in the city. The genuinely cosmopolitan city would be one whose governance is consistent with an egalitarian cosmopolitan approach which addresses inequalities and seeks to impartially promote the interests of all persons.

5.  Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies,” Theory, Culture, and Society 19 (2002): 17–​44, at 29. 6. For excellent discussions of the commodification of urban cosmopolitan culture, see the essays in Cosmopolitan Urbanism, eds. Jon Binnie, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington, and Craig Young (London: Routledge, 2006). 7. Ulrich Beck, “Cosmopolitical Realism: On the Distinction Between Cosmopolitaism in Philosophy and the Social Sciences,” Global Networks 4 (2004): 131–​56, at 150. 8.  See, for example, Fatimah Williams Castro, “Afro-​ Colombians and the Cosmopolitan City: New Negotiations of Race and Space in Bogota, Colombia,” Latin American Perspectives 40, no. 2 (2013): 105–​17. [ 194 ]  Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz

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We work to show here ways in which Medellín has taken some significant steps in that direction. We focus especially on how it did so, and how it might serve as a model in some important ways for the transformation of other cities globally in a direction more consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitanism.

8.3 LATIN AMERICA: LABORATORIES OF EQUITABLE URBANIZATION

The celebrated global economic boom of the last decades also produced a dramatic urban asymmetry and an explosion of informal development on the periphery of cities across the world. During this period of urban expansion in the United States, Europe, and Asia, many cities in Latin America began to chart a different course, experimenting with new paradigms of urban development driven by a commitment to social equity. While the attention and envy of the world was focused on sites of abundance, from Dubai to New York City, more creative and equitable models of urbanization were emerging in sites of conflict and scarcity in the Global South, particularly in Latin America. Latin America has long been one of the global epicenters of social injustice, marked by oppressive military dictatorships, deeply rooted oligarchy, and US Cold War interventionism. But in the last decades, many countries and subnational governments have resisted the neoliberal path and experimented with progressive political, economic, and social agendas that prioritize public investment, participatory governance, and equality. Challenging private logics of urban development, homogeneity, and exclusion, visionary mayors in cities such as Porto Alegre and Curitiba in Brazil, and Bogotá and Medellín in Colombia reimagined municipal institutions as engines of social justice, and they developed new methods of engaging the public and collaborating across sectors to confront poverty and rethink public infrastructure, public space, housing, and social service. What makes these Latin American cases distinctive in contemporary urbanization is not only that they were driven by egalitarian commitments and produced significant though sometimes uneven improvements in quality of life for the urban poor, but that their top-​down public investments were coupled with a commitment to renewing civic life and activating participatory democratic practices from the bottom up. Latin American cities have been vibrant sites of what James Tully has called “civic freedom,”9 a classical republican idea of freedom as a participatory civic activity by citizens in shared spaces, enacting what Henri Lefebvre described as the “right to the city.”10 The 9.  James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009), vol. I: 208b, 271–​72. 10.  Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville (Paris:  Anthopos, 1968). David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (September 2008): 23–​40.

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Latin American municipalities that inspire this chapter advanced their egalitarian agendas by connecting with latent participatory energies in the city and helping to cultivate a new culture of civic freedom from the bottom up. Again, from a cosmopolitan perspective, the civic and the global may seem to move in different directions, and they often do. But in these Latin American cases, renewing a sense of civic commitment in public life was essential to advancing the ends of global justice. Latin America has produced dozens of experimental urban projects in recent years, marked not only by top-​down municipal redistribution of resources through massive capital investment in public infrastructure and social service—​conventional tactics of social justice—​but also by a redistribution of knowledges, a rethinking of the role of the public in coproducing the city from the bottom up. We have written at length about these projects elsewhere—​from Sao Paulo’s SESCs (1977), to Porto Alegre’s “Participatory Budgets” (1989), to Curitiba’s urban acupunctural interventions (notably during Jaime Lerner’s administrations between 1971–​ 1992), to Bogota’s citizenship-​ culture interventions (1995). While these Latin American cases occurred across diverse political contexts and have had spotty successes over the long term, there was a significant and well-​documented learning curve that established a late-​twentieth-​century continental tradition of mobilizing the citizenry to shape the future of the city.11 In each case, municipalities were essential top-​down catalysts to activating bottom-​up sensibilities that were typically squashed into habits of acquiescence through centuries of imperialism, domination, and poverty. Bottom-​up democratic practices are the key to civic freedom, no doubt. But in contexts of severe deprivation and conflict, democratic sensibilities are frequently stunted and need cultivation and support. It is essential to acknowledge the role that egalitarian institutions can play in activating a sense of injustice, urgency, and collective capacity in the periphery.

8.4 MEDELLÍN, “THE MOST EDUCATED”: A GLOBAL VISION AT THE MUNICIPAL SCALE

We explore “cosmopolitan justice on the municipal scale” through an extraordinary Latin American case study:  Medellín, Colombia. This valley city of 2  million people was once regarded as “the most dangerous city on the planet”; home of cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar; a battleground of drug lords,

11.  See Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz, “Latin America and a New Political Leadership:  Experimental Acts of Co-​ Existence,” in Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Wilsdon, eds., Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). See also Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (London: Verso, 2014). [ 196 ]  Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz

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paramilitaries, and left-​wing guerillas, with murder figures as high as 6,300 in 1991 alone (380 per 100,000 people, a staggering statistic when compared to New York City in 1991, for example, with 29 murders per 100,000 people12); and a site of severe unemployment and poverty. Twenty years later, Medellín has captured the attention of urbanists, architects, and planners across the world for its interventions in the city’s most marginalized zones. The recent municipal history of Medellín is exemplary along the three egalitarian registers we outlined previously—​ positions, processes, and interventions. While the public welfare state paradigm is now in jeopardy, losing ground almost everywhere to neoliberal promises of trickle-​down wealth, Medellín committed itself to reducing poverty and violence through collaborative municipal governance and planning; the coordination of massive, cross-​sector investments in public infrastructure and social services in the city’s most vulnerable zones; and the cultivation of a vibrant, participatory civic culture. We believe Medellín is an ideal case study to convey the potential of municipal institutions to further global justice on the ground. Imagine first the city’s topography: bowl-​shaped, with the urban center at the bottom and informal comunas sprawling into the peripheral hillsides, typically so steeply that they were effectively cut off from the center, marginalizing their inhabitants geographically, but also socially and economically. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Medellín’s homicide rate was the highest per capita in the world, with equally dramatic unemployment and public health statistics. The isolated terrain of informal urban density was an ideal setting for the cartels to operate, enlist their armies, and maintain their own ruthless mix of social order and patronage. After Escobar was killed by Colombian government forces in 1993, with the assistance of US surveillance, his Medellín cartel quickly lost power. Others ascended to fill the void, but the Colombian military cracked down and the violence soon waned. Still, the city was left chaotic and in disarray, with neither the order nor the resources that the cartels had provided. In the decades since, a series of mayors have committed to tackling poverty and violence by embracing the egalitarian municipal agendas outlined earlier. Medellín presents a model of how a municipality committed to social justice transformed its city bureaucracy from a den of corruption, opacity, and paralysis into a transparent and collaborative public institution, and mobilized massive resources into the city’s poorest communities. Though many have come to see Medellín as emblematic among the civic experiments throughout Latin America, much information is still missing. Most accounts of Medellín’s transformations focus on the infrastructural and architectural interventions 12.  “What Would It Take to Get New  York City's Murder Rate to Zero?” New York Magazine (March 30, 2018):  http://​nymag.com/​news/​features/​crime/​2008/​42603/​ index5.html

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and their impacts, without acknowledging the unconventional political and civic commitments and processes that enabled these interventions to happen.13 Note, for example, the account given in 2012 when the Urban Land Institute (ULI) awarded Medellín its “Innovative City of the Year” prize: Originally distinguished for its progress and potential, the winning city found new solutions to classic problems of mobility and environmental sustainability. Today, gondolas and a giant escalator shuttle citizens from steep mountainside homes to jobs and schools in the valley below. As a result, travel time for the majority of its citizens has been cut from more than 2 hours to just a few minutes. In this city, a modern underground metro system has eased pollution and crowding in the city’s main arteries above, and glistening new museums, cultural centers, libraries, and schools enrich the community. . . . Connections create innovation, and it is no wonder that our winning City of the Year has achieved great success in bringing its residents together to assure opportunities for all.14

But how did institutions of governance transform to enable these public interventions? What was the role of Medellín’s citizens? Were they merely passive receptacles of municipal investment, liberated from their unproductive isolation to travel to work and consume? Was it really the infrastructure that restored hope and agency amid intransigent conflict and deprivation, or does this get the story backward? Where are the people of Medellín in this story of heroic, top-​down transformation? What were the transactions, exchanges, and negotiations that took place across institutions and communities that enabled the projects to materialize, succeed, and sustain themselves over time?

13. An important, but incomplete, exception is Francis Fukuyama and Seth Colby, “Half a Miracle: Medellín’s Rebirth Is Nothing Short of Astonishing. But Have the Drug Lords Really Been Vanquished?” Foreign Affairs (May/​June 2011): http://​foreignpolicy. com/​2011/​04/​25/​half-​a-​miracle/​; Francisco Iñigo P. Garde, “Bridging Development: The Medellín Experience,” Tholons report (February 2011):  www.tholons.com; Milford Bateman, Juan Pablo Duran Ortíz, and Kate Maclean, “A Post-​Washington Consensus Approach to Local Economic Development in Latin America? An example from Medellín, Colombia,” Overseas Development Institute report (April 2011): www.odi.org. uk; and John Drissen, “The Urban Transformation of Medellín, Colombia,” Architecture in Development (August 2012), http://​architectureindevelopment.org/​news. php?id=49. See also Joseph Stiglitz, “Medellín’s Metamorphosis Provides a Beacon for Cities Across the Globe,” The Guardian, May 8, 2014:  http://​www.theguardian.com/​ business/​2014/​may/​08/​Medellín-​livable-​cities-​colombia. Most recently, see McGuirk, Radical Cities, ch. 7. After we completed our research for this chapter, we discovered Kate Maclean’s excellent Social Urbanism and the Politics of Violence: The Medellín Miracle (London: Palgrave, 2015). 14. “City of the Year,” Wall Street Journal, http://​online.wsj.com/​ad/​cityoftheyear. [ 198 ]  Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz

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While processes of negotiation across institutions are natural to the strategies of urban planning, the stories behind these projects in Medellín are atypical in their scope and complexity. Medellín committed itself to a very different public imaginary to reinvigorate its civic culture and common wealth from the bottom up. Thus, this is not another story about gentrification and the development of a neoliberal “global city.” The ULI award (underwritten by Citibank and the Wall Street Journal) sees only the links between infrastructural investment and economic development, articulated in a smooth neoliberal narrative about innovation that masks Medellín’s egalitarian civic resistance to the dominant top-​down paradigms and patterns of twentieth-​ century urbanization.

8.4.1 The Medellín Diagram

The Medellín Diagram is a tool to help visualize the political and civic processes that enabled Medellín’s transformation.15 It was developed originally for the UN-​Habitat’s World Urban Forum, hosted in Medellín in April 2014. We partnered with Sergio Fajardo, former mayor of Medellín (2004–​2008); his “urban curator,” Alejandro Echeverri, responsible for many of the city’s most dramatic urban interventions during that period; and the Frankfurt-​based graphic designer Matthias Görlich. We designed the Diagram to be useful to the citizens of Medellín as a mirror of local self-​knowledge to guide future interventions, but also as a global tool for municipalities elsewhere eager to learn from the city’s achievements. Observers in recent years have typically focused on Medellín’s public infrastructural intervention projects themselves—​public buildings and schools, public art, and the Metrocable system, designed to navigate the topographical complexity of the territory and shrink once-​impassable distances between periphery and center, between poor and rich. It is astonishing for visitors to witness interventions of such profound aesthetic and technical quality, designed by world-​class architects and artists, in the city’s most precarious neighborhoods. These interventions have been hugely important tools of civic

15. The Medellín Diagram was first presented in the Medellín Museum of Modern Art, in spring 2014. It can be viewed online, in both Spanish and English, at http://​ medellin-​diagram.com. See also “La experiencia de Medellín es ahora una guía,” El Colombiano, April 10, 2014. Later iterations of the Diagram appeared in fall 2014 in the exhibition Citizen Culture, curated by Lucía Sanromán at the Santa Monica Museum of Art; in December 2015 in the Shenzhen Architectural Biennial exhibition Radical Urbanisms, curated by Alfredo Brillembourg and Herbert Klumpner; and most recently in March 2017, as part of Visualizing Citizenship, curated by Lucía Sanromán, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. See https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=z89ixMyyE1o.

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engagement, compressing space, increasing civic mobility, and helping to cultivate a sense of dignity and collective agency in neighborhoods marginalized by decades of poverty and violence. The buildings and transportation infrastructure are essential to the story of urban transformation in Medellín. But we wanted to understand the political and civic priorities and processes that enabled these intervention projects to be conceived, designed, funded, built, programmed, and maintained. To elevate Medellín as a model that might be translated and adapted to other contexts, it is essential to understand just how the city managed to reorient resources on such a massive scale toward the sites of greatest need. What must a city do—​what must it become—​to pull off such an accomplishment? How did the government need to transform? What kinds of institutional intersections were necessary? How were these interventions funded? What was the role of the bottom-​up? Our interest was less “What does Medellín look like?” but more “What did Medellín do, and how?” What must a municipality become, how must it transform, to achieve what Medellín did in so short a period of time? Ultimately, it is not by emulating buildings and transport systems that cities across the globe can begin to approximate the inclusive urbanization that transformed Medellín and dramatically improve the quality of life of the most vulnerable demographics over the last two decades. These are the processes we wanted to translate, so that Medellín might become intelligible as a model, not only as a set of buildings, structures, and spaces, but primarily as an imaginative set of political and civic processes that organized themselves around a new egalitarian agenda. Piecing these fragments together and translating them was essential, we thought, since the global media outlets focused on the products, but seldom on the institutional reform that was necessary to enable them. We conducted dozens of interviews with individuals involved in Medellín’s political and civic processes, from the mayor to social workers, and from artists and academics to civic philanthropists, since what happened there was a complex process of negotiation and collaboration across institutions and publics. We translated these stories and anecdotes, mapped them out, traced their momentum across time and through diverse geographies, and incrementally stitched them together in the Medellín Diagram. The Medellín process is presented in three broad categories that correspond to the egalitarian registers introduced at the beginning of this chapter:  priorities, processes, and interventions. Our argument is that the municipality of Medellín demonstrates the scalability of global justice because it does the following: . Prioritized the reduction of urban inequality over other political goals 1 2. Developed egalitarian and inclusive processes of governance

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3. Deployed egalitarian spatial interventions in the poorest, most marginalized zones Together, these commitments and actions advanced a powerful urban vision of peace and social equity, and each was essential to the emergence of a new public culture, in which the citizens of Medellín found their collective voice and asserted their rights to the city. The narrative that follows reproduces this Diagram scheme.16

8.4.2 The Medellín Diagram: Medellín Prioritized Inequality

At the height of violent conflict, Medellín was confronted with a choice—​to either surrender to the cycle of poverty and violence that had unraveled the social fabric of the city, and continue to spiral ever downward into chaos and global isolation, or to make bold collective decisions to take the city back. When Sergio Fajardo took office as mayor of Medellín in 2003, he declared that it was a distinct political moment in the evolution of the city, and that the municipality would commit itself to a new era of “social urbanism.”17 Fajardo was compelled to enter local politics in 2002. He was an academic who had grown frustrated with corruption and empty political talk. He ran for mayor of Medellín as an independent candidate, on a platform of fighting urban inequality. His campaign began unconventionally, with a walking tour through every neighborhood in the city, connecting with diverse citizens door to door to understand their lives and their frustrations and to communicate an authentic interest in their stories and voices. Fajardo describes this now-​ legendary experience as “getting the city into his skin,” and coming to “love every part of it”—​an egalitarian sensibility at the scale of the urban.18 During the campaign, he summoned fifty individuals who represented diverse sectors across the city to help frame his political agenda and to reimagine the city. In 2004, he was elected as the first independent mayor in the urban history of Colombia. In recent years, as people have attempted to make sense of what happened in Medellín, many credit the quality of the architecture; others credit the inventiveness and determination of particular sectors; and still others call it 16. See http://​medellin-​diagram.com/​en/​. 17. See Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Taner Oc, and Stephen Tiesdell, From Public Places Urban Spaces (Oxford:  Architectural Press, 2003), p.  22, for a discussion of Mitchell Schwarzer’s typology of four contemporary urbanisms: traditional urbanism, conceptual urbanism, marketplace urbanism, and social urbanism. Also see http://​ urbanismosocialMedellín.universia.net.co/​home.jsp. 18. Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, Interview with Sergio Fajardo, Medellin, August 7, 2015.

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a one-​of-​a-​kind activist project whose idiosyncrasies cannot be reproduced. There is perhaps an element of truth in all of this. But Fajardo reminds us that Medellín’s urban transformation did not begin as an architectural initiative, to beautify the city with world-​class design. Medellín is not a story about political art, or about political architecture and urbanism. It is a story about reconstructing urban governance and civic life itself, driven by a deliberate political repositioning on poverty and urban violence. For Fajardo, the most important foundational act in the city’s history of urban transformation was an egalitarian moment:  it entailed “taking a position”19 against urban violence by confronting the socioeconomic inequality that had produced decades of alienation, vulnerability, and division. Exposing the socioeconomic roots of urban violence was the first step in cultivating a new urban dignity and helping to reconnect the public with the future of the city. This meant rejecting police repression as the conventional municipal response to violence and choosing instead to cultivate a new civic hope by developing new models of opportunity and civic participation at the scale of neighborhoods, and curating dignified spaces for the exercise of civic freedom in the city’s most marginalized zones. Among the very first things Fajardo did as mayor was to locate on a map the most vulnerable sites throughout the city—​those with the lowest quality-​ of-​life indicators—​and to commit his administration to urban development there, rather than the typical zones of investment and profit. He declared: “We will not build down here (in the center, where the votes are), but up there (in the periphery, where the necessities are).”20 The idea was to speculate how the city could grow from the edges back to the center, rather than the more conventional development pattern of emerging from the center outward. Fajardo’s shifting of priorities was accompanied by a new era of municipal leadership in the creation of public space and public infrastructure, designed to stimulate urban flows across deeply entrenched socioeconomic spatial barriers, to activate a new era of civic participation across the city, and a new sense of dignity and hope within communities marginalized by decades of urban violence. This massive investment of intellectual, economic, and social capital in the poorest zones of a city is a unique example of municipal egalitarianism in the world today, and this is the reason why we have found the Medellín case so compelling. Fajardo’s position detonated a new era of civic hope and unprecedented waves of civic philanthropy and community representation to respond to the urban crisis, reigniting a long civic tradition in the city. Medellín is proud of its historical commitment to cross-​institutional collaboration. There is a lineage of actors dating back to the early twentieth century who stewarded 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. [ 202 ]  Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz

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meaningful interfaces between industrial and labor interests that yielded progressive syndicalist movements and innovative social housing and public infrastructure. Industrialist Ricardo Olano in the 1920s, for example, established the Sociedad de Mejoras Publicas de Medellín, which effectively elevated Medellín’s commitment to public works by linking natural systems with social spaces and cultural institutions. Olano had visited Boston during the years of FDR’s New Deal and became enamored with Frederick Law Olmstead’s Emerald Necklace, a plan for a string of public parks in Boston. Olano was inspired by the American commitment to a new era of public investment, stewarded by collaborations across government, universities, and the private sector. When he returned to Medellín, he founded the Sociedad de Mejoras Publicas de Medellín. Olano was also the first to propose planning education in the city’s universities. This interface between environmental systems, educational institutions, and public space would become a key urban strategy decades later in Fajardo’s administration. This Olano anecdote is not meant to valorize American exceptionalism, but to emphasize a progressive social history in the United States that has faded today, but was once defined by a similar public commitment for which Medellín is now best known. While this civic energy in Medellín was notoriously interrupted by years of drug violence, threads of civic consciousness wove through that tragic period, focusing primarily on issues of peace and mediation and working toward the dissolution of armed struggle and a transition to social reform. The work of Corporacion Region is exemplary here for developing new models of public communication and participation to mediate conflict and discuss the transition to a pluralistic, rights-​bearing political and economic democracy. Their exemplary tactics of conflict mediation paved the way for progressive policies produced by mayors committed to a postviolence era, which reached its apex with Fajardo’s administration. The Medellín model demonstrates the power of resuscitating civic lineages embedded in a city’s institutional memory as support systems for civic projects.

8.4.3 The Medellín Diagram: Medellín Designed Inclusive Governance

Global justice is a scalable concept. We have been arguing that institutions of governance on any scale can be more or less egalitarian—​and more or less consistent with an egalitarian cosmopolitan moral outlook—​in their positions and priorities, their techniques of governance, and the sites of urban interventions they target. In the previous section, we explored Fajardo’s egalitarian vision and his commitment to bridging the distance between rich and poor by reenergizing a new civic pride—​a sense of shared citizenship across G l o b a l J u s t i c e at t h e M u n i c ipa l   S c a l e  

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socioeconomic and territorial barriers. In this section, we turn our attention to the municipality itself, and Fajardo’s commitment to egalitarian practices of municipal governance. The summoning of diverse resources and knowledges to coproduce a more equitable city is an egalitarian move on the scale of the local, just as the convening of diverse resources and knowledges across the globe to coproduce a more just planet is an egalitarian move on the scale of the global. Similarly, we can characterize outcomes as egalitarian, whether on the local or global scale, when these collaborative institutions redistribute summoned resources and knowledges to sites of marginalization to benefit the least well off. Mayors across the world frequently articulate egalitarian aspirations, but unless these aspirations are backed up with resources, a collaborative sensibility, and a commitment to intelligently conceiving, designing and managing coordinated strategies, the likelihood of producing interventions that are more than symbolic, and that improve the quality of life for all in substantial and sustainable ways, is doubtful. Fajardo understood that urban transformation must begin with intervening into municipal bureaucracy itself. His administration designed a new model of governance and city management that enabled cross-​departmental collaboration, transversal relations across sectors, and new interfaces between the municipality and bottom-​up community dynamics. The Medellín model demonstrates that advances in inclusive urban infrastructure demand a transformation in government bureaucracy itself, from an opaque, labyrinthine system of inefficiencies to a flexible, highly agile, and inclusive form of governance that links public policy with public imagination. Reorganizing city management was Fajardo’s first challenge. He began as all new administrations should:  with the design of a new organizational chart, which included the creation of a new type of city manager tasked with coordinating municipal projects across departments and agencies, inside and outside of government. (See Figure 8.1.) Fajardo was eager to build public trust while longer-​ term, more comprehensive interventions were being conceptualized and designed. So, very early in his administration, he began responding to the most urgent community needs through small-​scale, acupunctural interventions. For example, three days after taking office, he demolished a decayed barrier wall in an old botanical garden that separated the informal settlement of Moravia from the city center. This wall had been perhaps the most emblematic barrier between rich and poor in the entire city, and its destruction immediately communicated the city’s new commitment to porosity and flow. This performative act opened the space both concretely and imaginatively for a series of public works that would soon come. Maintaining healthy relations and communication with the public remained essential to Fajardo, and not merely as a tactic to garner votes. An exemplary outcome of this commitment was the creation of a new public communication [ 204 ]  Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz

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Figure 8.1. The Medellín Diagram.

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office tasked with producing more transparent and inclusive governance and building public trust. More broadly, Fajardo transformed his mayoral office into an urban laboratory, a platform for conceiving creative modes of civic engagement and urban intervention. The municipality became a hub for consolidating fragmented policies and agendas, summoning the knowledges and resources of government, academia, community leadership, and the private sector, framed by a renewed commitment to civic action. By integrating the best urban thinking across sectors, Fajardo’s administration could lead a more intelligent redistribution of these knowledges and resources back into the city, and particularly into sites of greatest need. To achieve this, Fajardo brought urban design into city management. He summoned architect and urbanist Alejandro Echeverri as an “Urban Curator” to facilitate an exchange of knowledge between the design professionals, university researchers, and urban activists. It was only inside the municipality that new political and social processes could be conceptualized in tandem with urban design criteria and financial frameworks to execute projects. New forms of governance at local scales and new interfaces between institutions and publics could simultaneously engage the scale of the territory and the scale of neighborhoods, connecting the abstraction of large planning logics with the specificity of everyday practices in communities. This influx of creativity transformed the mayor’s office into an engine of ideas that gave shape to a community-​based urban vision, transforming informal settlements into laboratories of governance and socioeconomic development, enabling corridors of knowledge exchange between governments and communities. The most important sites of intervention here were the processes and methods of working—​the structure itself—​in order to generate new tools and procedures for innovative outreach efforts in neighborhoods, in partnership with local organizations to reimagine public space and infrastructure, mobility, neighborhood-​based planning, and regional socioeconomic development. The designing of process also meant designing new interfaces across agencies. Fajardo’s administration empowered a variety of agencies inside city government tasked with urban design, and mobilized collaborations across city departments to achieve results with unprecedented speed. Notable here was the role of Empresa de Diseño Urbano (ED), tasked with conceiving and executing tactical urban projects in neighborhoods (Proyectos Urbanos Integrados, or PUIs). PUIs enabled holistic and integrated design strategies on local scales, working in partnership with communities through new participatory design processes to reclaim public space and develop smaller infrastructural interventions such as bridges, stairs, social spaces, and athletic fields. Finally, designing governance entailed redirecting economic flows. People naturally inquire how Medellín was able to pay for such comprehensive urban

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interventions. The urban transformations in Medellín were facilitated by a network of agencies tasked with mediating top-​down and bottom-​up resources and redirecting them into socially responsible urban development. A combination of progressive income taxation, dividends from city-​owned utilities, and private investments was committed to public use. Empresas Publicas de Medellín (EPM, or Medellín Public Works) remains an essential economic engine for these achievements. This city agency owns telecommunications, water, and energy services, and through a shared process of decision-​making with the mayor, redirects 30 percent to 40 percent of dividends directly into public infrastructure. In the United States, this would amount to “socialism.” In Medellín, and Latin America at large, however, where mayors win elections on platforms of raising taxes, EPM is considered an exemplary public agency with private organizational logics, in terms of transparency, efficiency, and the capacity to redirect surplus value toward socially responsible urban development. Medellín’s successes in recent years represent a radical departure from the top-​down models of urban development endorsed by autocratic governments in China and the United Arab Emirates, and the urbanisms of gentrification through which private development corporations homogenize cities, democratizing happiness across Europe and the United States. In Medellín, public-​private partnerships are not merely government-​corporate alliances, but include community partners, assuring that benefits are distributed equitably.

8.4.4 The Medellín Diagram: Medellín Spatialized Citizenship Through Egalitarian Urban Intervention

Medellín’s egalitarian municipal ingenuity was followed by the egalitarian spatial interventions for which the city has rightfully gained global attention. Medellín narrowed the gap between wealth and poverty and helped to ignite a new civic culture by committing to egalitarian interventions that compressed the distance between the center and the periphery, transgressed urban borders with public infrastructure, designed spatial interventions marked by aesthetic and programmatic excellence, dramatically expanded social services, and opened new sites of opportunity to marginalized populations. The driving force behind Medellín’s urban transformation was Mayor Sergio Fajardo’s commitment to transforming it into “the most educated” city in Colombia. He insisted that human dignity in the city rested on education for all—​that social justice depended not only on the redistribution of resources, but on the redistribution of knowledges. Violence limits life opportunities; knowledge opens them.

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To activate this egalitarian urban agenda, Medellín’s visionary mayors began by identifying sites of greatest vulnerability throughout the city—​ sites that poverty and urban violence had turned into islands of neglect. It is symbolic that the physical transformations began in the comuna of Santo Domingo, which had been the stronghold of Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel and the most violent and isolated neighborhood in the city. Santo Domingo was historically cut off from the center—​too steep for mobility—​abandoning its inhabitants to decades of poverty, illiteracy, and radical violence. The isolated terrain of informal urban density was the ideal setting for the drug cartels to operate. Medellín first transgressed this urban border with its famed public transport gondolas, the Metrocable, and with a network of public infrastructural projects, exemplified by the renowned España Library Park in Santo Domingo. When Mayor Fajardo took office, his directive was clear:  “We will not build down here, but we will build up there.” This shifting of the gaze away from the center and toward reimagining the city from its periphery is an egalitarian move—​indeed, we suggest, a paradigm shift that moves urban development priorities from the predictable zones of investment to the most marginalized and traditionally underserved zones. Fajardo’s coordination of cross-​sector investment of intellectual, economic, and social capital in the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods is arguably the finest example of equitable urbanization in the world of urban planning today A second site of intervention was the slum of Moravia. Typical of Medellín’s urban interventions across the city, this neighborhood project began with rethinking public circulation through fragmented spaces. Here, the urban system was organized along a new civic boulevard, the Carabobo, designed to link Moravia with the city center. A series of civic projects, with support systems designed to increase neighborhood flow and incentivize local knowledge and economy, were clustered along the boulevard as it penetrated the neighborhood, including Camilo Restrepo’s refurbished Botanical Garden and Alejandro Echeverri’s Parque Explora Science Museum—​a large cultural institution with a mandate to democratize science—​extending to the Moravia Cultural Center and deeper into the neighborhood, beyond the boulevard’s end, to Casa Amarilla, a smaller cultural venue whose arts and culture programming, for decades, had been cocurated with the local community. More than discreet architectural objects, the public projects in Moravia perform together as a relational urban system that moves from the large to the small, creating civic space as it distributes into the urban fabric. The relational system performs as an urban thread that stitches the marginalized community with cultural institutions, public spaces, and other support systems that incentivize local knowledge and economy. [ 208 ]  Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz

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8.4.5 The Medellín Diagram: Programming the “Most Educated” City

Medellín rejected police repression in favor of community processes and urban education. Fajardo, a former professor of mathematics, insisted that education was the key to a more egalitarian future for the city and that every public infrastructural intervention should further the mandate:  “Medellín, the most educated.” This manifested most clearly in his famous Library Parks project, which challenged the conventional idea that public space is a space of beautification and leisure—​that if we simply fill a space or plaza with foliage and murals, we will magically assure civic engagement and inclusion. For Fajardo, public-​space projects in marginalized neighborhoods needed not only physical design excellence, but also long-​term institutional support and programming, managed by cross-​sector coalitions to ensure sustainability over time. To ensure civic activity over time, Fajardo committed to designing each park or public space in tandem with the design of cultural programs, pedagogic support systems, vocational training, and the incubation of small-​scale economic development. This was a powerful egalitarian message that moved the discussion of public space from a neutral urban commodity animated by random encounters to the deliberate democratization of space, directing resources and knowledge to diverse and historically underserved publics and communities, insisting that social justice today rested not only on the redistribution of resources, but on the redistribution of knowledge. This is one of the most important legacies of the Medellín model: to build citizenship culture by reorganizing the spaces of the city and creating accessibility through systems of mobility that enable a flow of people across these sites and stations. The ultimate legacy of this urban model is that civic spaces cannot exist on their own. They must be curated and nurtured by a collective imagination where buildings and protocols meet to perform citizenship. In Medellín, each public project is supported by a carefully orchestrated cross-​sector network of agencies (see Appendix) that share responsibility for funding, programming, and maintaining the interventions. Medellín’s Library Parks, for example, are comanaged by community-​based agencies and special public-​private entities such as Cajas de Compensacion (COMFENALCO and COMFAMA), which assure programmatic and economic sustainability over time. Parque Explora is not just another museum, but the result of a process curated and enabled by ProAntioquia, a civic philanthropic nongovernmental organization (NGO) that summoned a variety of stakeholders across sectors to codesign cultural programming and economic support systems to assure responsive and sustainable activity over the long term. Indeed, each of Medellín’s designed cultural spaces is charged with specific programming that assures longevity and accessibility, supported by coalitions of public and private entities such as Cajas de Compensacion and the municipality. G l o b a l J u s t i c e at t h e M u n i c ipa l   S c a l e  

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8.5 MUNICIPAL COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE INSTITUTIONAL ECOLOGIES OF GLOBAL JUSTICE

While this chapter has emphasized the egalitarian agenda of a single city, the case of Medellín demonstrates that municipalities eager to fight poverty and violence cannot go it alone. Medellín relied on the coordinated assistance and support of actors on larger scales. Fajardo’s municipal agenda was supported by important reforms in federal planning policy, newly available federal resources, support for municipal activities, and the external support of the US government. Federal reforms that provided an egalitarian mandate and resources, as well as a strong regional power that provided the intelligence necessary to help the federal government crack down on local drug culture across the country (particularly in the notorious cartel stronghold of Medellín), enabled Fajardo and his predecessors to travel with the wind rather than against it. Fajardo’s urban agenda was also fortified by federal constitutional reforms in 1991 that were grounded in a commitment to human rights, social welfare, and reconciling large-​scale egalitarian planning logics with local implementation. These reforms were backed by the allocation of resources to local and regional governments and agencies to enable a new local focus on social, cultural, and environmental systems. Some notable local effects of this shift in federal priorities included the following: • The environmental declaration of watershed systems as public domain (Art. 63 and 82), enabling mayor Luis Perez (2001–​2004) to claim a point of access into the slopes of Medellín for the construction of the famed Metrocable system. • The designation of socially engaged work as cultural patrimony, entitling community-​based agencies for federal arts and culture funding (1997 General Cultural Law, Art. 66). This enabled community-​based curators and activists like Jorge Blandon to develop Casa Amarilla as a cultural engine to reclaim the marginalized community of Moravia. • Federal funding for local processes of conflict mediation. During the most dramatic period of conflict in Medellín in the late 1980s, Corporación Región was tasked by the federal government (Presidential Council for Medellín) to mediate conflict by conducting Alternative community seminars for the future of Medellín, through which armed struggle would dissolve into peace, democracy, and social reform. This unprecedented public communication campaign to facilitate dialogue was foundational for Fajardo’s political agenda. By emphasizing in this chapter that Medellín implemented the egalitarian principles of global justice on the local scale, we do not mean to suggest that [ 210 ]  Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz

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municipalities can go it alone, particularly in sites of extreme violence and social unrest. Generalizing from the Medellín case and becoming relevant to cities such as Mexico City and Mumbai, for example, means recognizing the way that action was coordinated not only across sectors, but across political-​ institutional scales as well. Clearly, the institutional stars aligned for Medellín, enabling a series of visionary mayors and collaborators to activate their egalitarian municipal aspirations at precisely the right moments in time.

8.6 CHASTENED CONCLUSIONS

While Medellín is a unique model of urbanization in the world, we must not forget that these processes are not complete. It would be inaccurate to declare Medellín’s crises “over” or “resolved.” In fact, citizens regularly voice irritation when confronted with rosy accounts of their city’s successes amid its ongoing urban problems. Every news story and global prize celebrating Medellín’s miraculous transformation in recent years has been met with skepticism among the vocal citizens, who emphasize the city’s persistent poverty, unemployment, drugs and street crime, noting as well that Antioquia remains the most inequitable region in all of Colombia. Moreover, while municipal investment in the last decades has focused on the most marginalized zones, the wealthier parts of the city, primarily neighborhoods in the south, like Polao, have remained in the hands of developers and their conventional patterns of development, with massive, high-​end, gated housing towers and retail construction projects, like those found in every city in the world, which cater to wealth and tourism, prioritize security and privacy over architectural quality, and privatize public spaces, effectively excluding a majority of Medellín’s citizens. Nevertheless, while we agree with these critiques, we disagree with the way they too often dismiss the most emancipatory and egalitarian dimensions of Medellín’s transformations, the procedures of which need to be recuperated, translated, and generalized as models. While Medellín is a composite canvas of development and remains a work in progress on many fronts, as so many Latin American cities are, experiencing setbacks and often struggling to stay on course, the 80 percent decrease in homicide and dramatic rise in all major public health indicators in recent years are impressive by any standard.21 Some might say we are too optimistic about the role of institutions and politicians in producing egalitarian transformation in cities. But at a time when both the left and the right seem to be converging in their mistrust of public 21. Magdalena Cerda, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, Ben B. Hansen, Kimberly J. Tessari Hicks, Luis F. Duque, Alexandra Restrepo, and Ana V. Diez-​Roux, “Reducing Violence by Transforming Neighborhoods: A Natural Experiment in Medellın, Colombia,” American Journal of Epidemiology, 175, no. 10 (2012): 1045–​53.

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institutions, we have found in the Medellín story the strands of a renewed era of effective, progressive political leadership that is urgently needed today. It was Sergio Fajardo’s egalitarian mandate that detonated a new civic moment in Medellín. But while we have given the protagonism to Fajardo to emblematize the importance of political leadership, we also acknowledge that this top-​ down mobilization of hope and resources depended on years of bottom-​up activism that cannot be overlooked in Medellín’s story, or in the models of urban transformation that we might wish to generalize from it. Medellín is a living, breathing egalitarian urban experiment that sometimes experiences frustrating lapses in its transformational momentum. Processes must be continually tweaked, refined, and layered; successful processes need translation and continuity across generations. Much remains to be done about the redistribution of knowledges and resources across metropolitan, regional, and national scales. Antioquia’s outgoing governor Sergio Fajardo, presently running for the presidency of Colombia, is now pursuing that very possibility. The crucial lesson to take here, however, is that Medellín provides an alternative model of a cosmopolitan city—​not a model of gentrification and commodification, but one which can be seen as consistent, with a commitment to egalitarian cosmopolitanism, and which would go some distance toward promoting global cosmopolitan aims on the most local levels.

Appendix: Institutions CONSEJERÍA PRESIDENCIAL PARA MEDELLÍN

Tasked with reducing violence in Medellín by organizing conflict resolution tables in communities and recuperating civic life through the Seminars for the Future of Medellín. PRIMED

A joint program between city and federal governments to promote public infrastructural improvements in marginal neighborhoods, including coordinating social participation. EMPRESA DE DESARROLLO URBANO DE MEDELLÍN (EDU)

In collaboration with the City Planning Department, this autonomous urban think tank is tasked with conceptualizing, managing, and executing integrated local strategic planning projects (PUIs), as well as coordinating architectural projects and their programs, such as the Library Parks and Quality Schools.

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PROYECTOS URBANOS INTEGRALES (PUI)

A platform to execute tactical urban design and planning in marginalized zones, facilitating interfaces between the social (active community participation), the institutional (cross-​institutional coordination to achieve integrated actions into the zone of intervention), and the physical (construction and improvement of public spaces and infrastructure). CAJAS DE COMPENSACIÓN FAMILIAR-​C OMFAMA (1954)

A set of nonprofits who receive 4  percent of social security revenue and are tasked with redistributing it to fund health, education, recreation, and cultural programming, as well as affordable housing and microcredit for all Colombians. These agencies also manage the programming of the Library Parks. UNIVERSITIES

Tasked with providing research and technical support to the municipality to fortify the PUIs, as well as producing new collaborations between social workers, city employees, and public communication. MEDELLÍN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

More than an agency that only benefits the business sector, this chamber has a public mandate to collaborate with government to provide creative consultancy for rethinking public and private relations and new forms of local economy. CEDEZOS

Agencies that are distributed across marginalized neighborhoods to support entrepreneurship and microlending and to build community capacity to elevate small businesses and grow informal economies. These agencies are housed in the Library Parks. EMPRESA DE SERVICIOS PÚBLICOS DE MEDELLÍN (EPM)

A city agency that owns public utilities, and redirects 30 percent to 40 percent of its profits to public works and social services. INDER (INSTITUTO DE DEPORTES Y RECREACIÓN DE MEDELLÍN)

A municipal agency tasked with organizing programs for social inclusion among young, displaced, and physically challenged populations.

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COMITES DE ESCALA BARRIAL

Neighborhood-​based associations located in each Metro station, tasked with organizing community workshops for civic imagination, enabling communities to participate in urban design projects. CASA AMARILLA

A community-​based cultural agency tasked with developing neighborhood arts and culture programs to activate a sense of neighborhood memory and cultivate dignity and aspirational planning for the future. CORPORACIÓN REGIÓN 1989

A nonprofit think tank that promotes critical thinking about human rights and democratic agency and coordinates spaces of debate, conflict mediation and collective action. BANCO DE OPORTUNIDADES–​C ULTURA E

A bank for the poor, seeking to produce alternative modes of financialization and methods of social protection. ASENCULTURA

A cultural nonprofit that raises awareness about Medellín’s cultural patrimony. LA PIEL DE LA MEMORIA

A cultural project, sponsored in part by the Chamber of Commerce, tasked with recuperating memory in neighborhoods stigmatized by violence. YO TE CUENTO

A program that uses theater to recuperate and register testimonials from displaced communities. GALERÍA URBANA

A municipal project to archive everyday life in Santo Domingo and create murals of its inhabitants and their domestic spaces. BIBLIOTECA PÚBLICA PILOTO

A nonprofit that disseminates public information and promotes reading and digital literacy.

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CASAS DE LA CULTURA

A network of eight cultural houses that organize and curate activities generated and coproduced by communities. CONSEJO MUNICIPAL DE CULTURA

An association comprised of the main representatives of diverse cultural areas, including art, theater, and music, that codesigns content, programs, and cultural activities to benefit neighborhoods. CONVOCATORIAS DE FOMENTO AL ARTE Y LA CULTURA

A citywide competition that makes public funding available for community-​ generated cultural proposals. ANIMACIÓN URBANA

Tasked with programming public spaces with cultural activity. FORMACIÓN DE PÚBLICOS

Tasked with the formation of publics and citizenship culture. RED CULTURAL DEL BARRIO MORAVIA

An association belonging to the Moravia Cultural Center that works to ensure the participation of social networks in the neighborhood. CREACIÓN DEL COMITÉ INTERINSTITUCIONAL

Incubates cross-​institutional collaborations in Moravia. PLANEACIÓN DEL DESARROLLO ZONAL

A public policy program focusing on specific neighborhood-​based planning projects through community-​based participation. MESAS PERMANENTES DE TRABAJO CIUDADANO

A roundtable program tasked with curating the interfaces among universities, community leaders, NGOs, and private-​and public-​sector entities. CORPORACIÓN CUTURAL NUESTRA GENTE

An NGO dedicated to the strategic dialogue of young demographics in the city, promoting artistic activity in communities.

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CHAPTER 9

Demos-​cracy for the European Union Why and How PHILIPPE VAN PARIJS  

9.1 INTRODUCTION

Democratic institutions on a global scale are still a dream. But they are a bit less of a dream because of the most ambitious and most successful supranational entity that ever came into being voluntarily in the history of humanity. From its birth as a six-​member European Coal and Steel Community, what has now become the 28-​member European Union (EU) has been an unrelenting attempt to design effective common institutions consistent with respect for the diversity of the nation-​states that compose it. This unprecedented entity, however, is now in deep trouble—​less deeply in trouble, no doubt, than at the time of President de Gaulle’s “empty chair,” which prevented all decisions

    Earlier versions of this text were presented as one in a series of three talks on “Political Philosophy for 21st Century Europe” (Harvard University, January 2013); at the final section of the seminar “Justice and Democracy Beyond the Nation State” (University of Oxford, June 2013); and at the workshop “Demos-​cracy for a Fragmented Polity:  Considerations from Europe and Switzerland” (University of St. Gallen, February 2014). Special thanks to Thomas Burri, Luis Cabrera, Micheline Calmy-​ Rey, Francis Cheneval, Patrick Emmenegger, Christoph Frei, Lisa Herzog, Mathias Köenig-​Archibugi, Glyn Morgan, Yascha Mounk, Antoinette Scherz, Andrew Walton, and Leif Wenar for useful feedback. The Brexit vote in the United Kingdom (UK), which occurred after this chapter was finalized, does not affect its substance. But it does create, especially in conjunction with the presidency of Donald J. Trump in the United States, yet another major challenge for the European Union, a central aspect of which is discussed in Philippe Van Parijs, “Thatcher’s Plot,” Social Europe, November 29, 2016, https://​www.socialeurope.eu/​thatchers-​plot-​defeat.

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for several months in 1965–​66 strategy and various other life-​threatening crises the fledgling European institutions had to face, but far more visibly and tangibly in trouble than on any previous occasion because the European Union has come to matter so much more to its citizens, especially those in the Eurozone, than ever before. “Deep trouble” means that serious problems are being recognized and that there is some momentum to address them. One of these problems relates to the way in which the European Union is being governed. We realize that the way the European Union is being run is problematic in many ways, but also that it cannot be governed like a nation—​which it is far from being and has no vocation to become—​nor indeed like a mere international organization (IO)—​which it no longer is and will never be again. How, then, should the European Union be governed?

9.2 EDUCATIONAL, CIVILIZING, DISCIPLINING: DEMOCRACY’S THREE VIRTUES

To answer this question, it is best to leave aside the shallow and unhelpful notion of democratic deficit and the associated ludicrous idea that good government is maximally democratic government.1 In order to get started on a more promising track, let us rather ask, before zooming in on the European Union, a very general and fundamental question: what is it that justifies a presumption in favor of a mode of collective decision-​making that is democratic, in the thin sense of relying ultimately on free voting, universal suffrage, and some form of majority rule? There are three basic justifications for this presumption. The first two focus on the expected quality of the collective decisions, and the third one on the cost of enforcing them. Why should the democratic nature of a collective decision-​making process increase the probability that the decisions it generates will be good? The first reason is rooted in the educational force of vote fishing. This cognitive or epistemic virtue of democracy was neatly highlighted by Josiah Ober’s analysis

1.  The purely instrumental approach to democracy that I  am adopting here is defended and illustrated in Philippe Van Parijs, Just Democracy: The Rawls-​Machiavelli Programme (Colchester, UK:  ECPR Press, 2011). There, I  qualify it at the margin in two ways: the right to take part in collective decisions can be said to be part of the real freedom which justice requires us to distribute in maximin fashion, and universal equal suffrage is a direct implication of justice as equal dignity. These are important qualifications, but of marginal importance for our present discussion: the former because it carries much weight only for local democracy, and the latter because it imposes only a very weak constraint on allowable decision-​making procedures (it should even be understood as being consistent with the overrepresentation of small components of divided societies).

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of ancient Greek cities.2 In a democracy, the need to be elected and reelected forces political leaders to reach out and listen, to gather valuable but widely scattered knowledge from all those on whose vote they depend: about their situation and their problems, their fears and their hopes. Under a despotic regime, by contrast, rulers are not constrained in the same way. They need to keep an eye on their subjects, but more to check how many weapons they possess than to find out about their aspirations, and they can stay in power even if they know little else besides what their secret police, their courtiers, and their bureaucrats bother to tell them. Decisions guided by broader and better information from those affected can be expected to be better.3 The second reason for expecting democratic decisions to be better decisions derives from what Jon Elster aptly called the “civilizing force of hypocrisy.”4 This reason holds because the democratic process does not reduce to voting, to the aggregation of preferences. If it functions properly, it also involves deliberation, the formulation and discussion of arguments. It must, therefore, give a key role to the conversation that precedes elections, particularly during the electoral campaign, and to the conversation that follows them, especially in parliamentary assemblies. In the conversations induced by the democratic process, aspiring political leaders of all persuasions and temperaments tend to develop a discourse that appeals to some notion of general interest, or of fair treatment of the interests of all those present in the electorate or represented in the assembly, or of concern for the fate of the worst off among potential voters.5 Whether sincere

2. Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 3.  Drèze and Sen’s (1991) famous analysis of the difference between China’s and India’s responsiveness to the outbreak of famines can be interpreted along these lines. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1991). There are more versions of the “epistemic” argument in favor of democracy that usefully highlight further dimensions. See David Estlund, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2008); Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi, “Cognitive Democracy” (unpublished MSS, George Washington University, 2013); José L. Marti, “Why (Deliberative) Democracy Has Epistemic Value and Why It Is Not Enough to Justify It” (unpublished MSS, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 2013). The core of its most powerful version, however, is well captured in Ober’s approach. 4.  Jon Elster, “Introduction,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–​18, at 12. 5. The boundaries of the civilizing process are set by the perimeter of the relevant electorate, i.e., the set of people whose vote one has an incentive to try to attract. This excludes all those who do not have voting rights in the relevant constituency, a point of crucial importance for the argument to follow—​but also people regarded as inaccessible, for example because of deep ethnic cleavages, to anything one might say, and therefore not included, however poor their condition, among “the most vulnerable among us.” [ 218 ]  Philippe Van Parijs

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or not, this discourse ends up having some impact on their acts. The need to sound good in the deliberative forum civilizes not only their words, but also their policies. The third basis for a strong presumption in favor of democracy resides in the disciplining force of self-​infliction. Any political entity will work more efficiently if the enforcement of its decisions does not require an expensive, intrusive, or repressive apparatus. Enforcement is easy and cheap if those subject to the decisions and rules regard them as legitimate. This can be because they happen to believe that the decisions and rules are good (this is so-​called output legitimacy). But for a political entity to function smoothly, voluntary compliance must also be prompted in the overwhelming majority of cases in which many of those expected to comply with the decisions either believe these to be bad or have no idea about whether they are good or bad. This can happen as a result of people recognizing that the decision-​makers were entitled to make them (this is the so-​called input legitimacy). In earlier times, such recognition could often be achieved thanks to enough subjects believing that God had endowed their monarch with the appropriate authority. In modern societies, such authority may occasionally be bestowed upon charismatic leaders perceived as incarnating the nation for better or worse (Hitler, Castro, Mandela?) or upon wise old men believed to combine unfailing competence and impeccable integrity (a national “government of technicians” formed in a crisis situation, a European Commission whose members are bound by an oath of impartiality, the venerable leaders of the Chinese Communist Party?). However, the most general and safest way of making decisions acceptable to individual citizens and subordinate political entities, irrespective of their content, is to let them decide freely who can decide on their behalf; i.e., to give citizens the power to choose their rulers and to get rid of them through a fair democratic process. The higher probability of voluntary—​and hence cheap—​compliance secured in this way provides a third ground for a strong presumption in favor of democracy.6 All three justifications, not only the last one, could be said to derive ultimately from one feature of democracy famously emphasized by Karl Popper, that democracy is all about throwing out the rascals.7 But for the first two justifications to work, it is those affected by the decisions who need to have the

6.  This third justification could be captured in a simple proposition:  democracy legitimizes the rulers and their decisions. However, it is important to understand that this legitimacy, from my standpoint, does not matter in itself for intrinsic reasons, but only for instrumental reasons: the fact that decisions and rulers are perceived as legitimate makes collective life smoother, less conflict-​ridden, and hence more effective for the sake of pursuing social justice. 7.  Karl Popper, The Lessons of This Century (London:  Routledge 1997), at 43–​44; see also Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations:  The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge 2004[1963]), at 472–​73.

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ability to help fire the “rascals,” whereas for the third one to work, it is those who need to comply with the decisions who need to possess this ability. This difference will prove important when we focus on the European Union—​as we now proceed to do.

9.3 THE EUROPEAN UNION: VIRTUOUS ELECTORAL IMMUNITY AND CROSS-​B ORDER EXTERNALITIES

Insofar as the presumption in favor of democracy hinges on the first two justifications, it is clear that it loses much of its force when a large proportion of the people affected by the decisions do not vote. This is the case, even with universal suffrage and high voting turnout, if decisions made in one country impact significantly what happens in another and/​or if decisions made by one generation impact significantly the fate of later generations. What democracy throws out is the unpopular, but the unpopular need not be rascals. They can also be high-​minded advocates of the interests of aliens or of the unborn. To start with, when there is a major impact on younger or future generations—​ for example through the effect of our lifestyle on climate change, or through the effect of current public spending and retirement rules on future tax liabilities—​even the best democracy remains a dictatorship of the present generation. For this reason, a “democratic deficit” can be a major advantage with regard to the quality of the decisions made, as soon as a fair treatment of the young and unborn is given due weight in the specification of this quality. Greater intergenerational justice may be achievable only as a result of some sovereignty being transferred to a less democratic level, with key decisions being made by institutions and individuals more immune to electoral pressures. Unpopular injunctions on carbon emissions or pension reform by a democratically unaccountable (or less accountable) European level could therefore lead to better decisions than if policies in this area were left to national political leaders structurally scared of being thrown out.8 Next, when there is a major impact on people in the current generation but beyond the borders of the entities at the level of which democracy operates, the problem is not as fundamentally intractable by democratic means as it is

8.  This argument is strengthened by the increasingly sophisticated nature of the knowledge needed to make good decisions, especially when long-​term effects are involved. This implies both that the educational force of the electoral pressure is less effective at inducing the collection of all relevant information and that lifting the decision power to a larger entity has the advantage of generating economies of scale in enlisting reliable expertise. See Dominique Bourg, “Quelles démocraties face aux défis environnementaux?” contribution to the conference La Démocratie Enrayée? in Brussels, Académie Royale (May 2013), for a persuasive argument about the systemic shortcomings of democracy in today’s ecological and technological contexts. [ 220 ]  Philippe Van Parijs

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when the impact is on unborn generations. It is in part in order to deal with cross-​border externalities of this sort that the European institutions were created and developed, but the volume of these externalities was massively swollen as a result of this very development, not least as a result of the adoption of a common currency by a subset of member-​states. How can these externalities be internalized? How can the democratic process be designed in such a way that both the educational force of vote fishing and the civilizing force of hypocrisy can do their work on the appropriate scale (i.e., in such a way that European political decision-​makers are induced to gather knowledge from all the people affected by their decisions and to develop a discourse that commits them to pursuing fairness with all of them)?

9.4 DEMOI-​C RACY VERSUS DEMOS-​C RACY

One avenue could be called demoi-​cratic.9 It consists of relying on each member-​state democracy taking the other member-​states into account. This is arguably achieved, to some extent, at the level of the executive through the operation of the Council of the European Union (or Council of Ministers) and the European Council (or council of heads of government). How much can be achieved in this way depends crucially on two factors. First, as ministers and especially heads of governments meet more often and about more issues, can their discussions go beyond bargaining for maximum national gain and turn into something like a search for honorable compromises, or even for solutions that all those sitting at the table can accept and defend as fair? Second, as the cameras, microphones, and tape recorders that await them at the exit of the meeting room become less mononational, will they feel forced to adopt a rhetoric that appeals to the citizens of all member-​states, not just their own? There are some signs that these two factors are at work, but background constraints cannot be ignored: the fundamental fact remains 9. “Demoi” is the plural of “demos.” I used this term in the present sense in Philippe Van Parijs, “Should the European Union Become More Democratic?” (reprinted as ­chapter  5 of Van Parijs, Just Democracy, 67–​77). Kalypso Nicolaidis and Francis Cheneval use it in related but distinct senses to refer to their respective views about what the European Union is and should be. Kalypso Nicolaidis, “We the Peoples of Europe,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 6 (2004):  97–​110; Kalypso Nicolaidis, “European Demoicracy and Its Crisis,” Journal of Common Market Studies 51, no. 2 (2013): 351–​ 69; Kalypso Nicolaidis, “Pragmatism, Idealism, and European Demoicracy,” in Anne-​ Marie Grozelier, Björn Hacker, Wolfgang Kowalsky, Jan Machnig, Henning Meyer, and Brigitte Unger, eds., Roadmap to a Social Europe (October 2013), e-​book: http://​ www.socialeurope.eu/​reports-​2/​ser-​ii-​roadmap-​to-​a-​social-​europe/​, 19–​ 24; Frances Cheneval, The Government of the Peoples. On the Idea and Principle of Multilateral Democracy (London: Macmillan, 2013). I shall argue that the nationally and linguistically fragmented nature of the European Union’s demos implies that Europe’s democracy should include demoi-​cratic features.

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that national leaders are electorally accountable to national electorates, and that it is therefore within these boundaries that the two mechanisms that enable democracies to make good decisions—​educational vote fishing and civilizing hypocrisy—​operate, while leaving decision-​making at the EU level essentially in the grip of bargaining for mutual benefit. An alternative and more ambitious demoi-​cratic strategy has recently become quite popular: a greater involvement of national parliaments in European politics.10 As the turnout at national elections tends to be significantly higher than at European elections, and the members of national parliaments tend to be closer to the citizens and better known by them than members of the European Parliament, it is hoped that this would increase the input legitimacy of European policies. If the formula amounts to some cosmetic consultation, little good will be done, but also little harm, except for a further slowing of European decision-​making and the absorption of scarce time which national parliaments could have devoted to their own competences. If some real veto power is involved, it is hard to see how this more ambitious parliamentary strategy would fail to make things worse rather than better compared to the current strategy involving the executives, as the two internalizing factors mentioned here can be expected to affect the members of national legislative assemblies far less than the members of national executives. Even under optimistic assumptions about how much interaction could be engineered through this channel across national assemblies and national public opinion, the assembly members’ competition for the votes of their respective national electorates will make national interests more salient and honorable compromises harder to strike than when the matter is in the hands of government leaders, in regular personal contact with one another behind closed doors and with an international public image to take care of.11 10.  See, e.g., Nicolaidis, “European Demoicracy,” and Nicolaidis, “Pragmatism, Idealism”; Damian Chalmers, Democratic Self-​Government in Europe (London:  Policy Network, 2013). Also see http://​www.policy-​network.net/​publications/​4399/​ democratic-​self-​government-​in-​europe; Anand Menon, “The European Union and the Nation State,” Policy Network (2013), http://​www.policy-​network.net/​pno_​detail.asp x?ID=4485&title=The+European+Union+and+the+nation+state; Richard Bellamy, “The Democratic Deficit, Social Justice, and the Eurozone Crisis,” in Richard Bellamy and Uta Staiger, eds., The Eurozone Crisis and the Democratic Deficit (London: European Institute, University College London, 2013), 3–​4, http://​www.ucl.ac.uk/​european-​ institute/​news-​repository/​2013-​14/​eurozone; Cheneval, The Government of the Peoples. My skepticism about this avenue does not entail a rejection of warning mechanisms that do not amount to veto powers, for example the “alarm bell procedure,” that forces EU-​level institutions to reconsider a measure (not to give it up) if some minimum number of national parliaments has declared that the measure infringes on the subsidiarity principle. 11. As a reinforcing factor (and perhaps to some extent as a consequence), one can mention the fact that parties represented in national governments are on average more pro-​European than parties represented in national parliaments (and these in turn on average more pro-​European than those represented in the European Parliament). For [ 222 ]  Philippe Van Parijs

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By contrast, the other avenue could be called demos-​cratic. It consists of relying on the development of democratic life at the European level. Obviously, the creation in 1979 of a directly elected European Parliament was a key step in this direction, and so has been the gradual increase of its powers. However, of the bodies that can be viewed as forming the EU executive, two—​the European Council and the Council of the European Union—​escape entirely any accountability to the European Parliament, and the other one—​the European Commission—​is very far from being dependent on parliamentary majorities in the strong way in which national governments are. Hence the straightforward, “federalist” proposal: let us just transpose to the EU level the standard national formula. This would mean turning the European Commission into a real government that needs to have the support of a majority of the members of the European Parliament and endowing it with the executive powers currently exercised by the council. It would also mean turning the council into a second legislative chamber, at least if maintaining the latter is deemed necessary. This would seem to pitch at the right level the educational and civilizing mechanisms that make for good decisions, and also the disciplining mechanism that would make European citizens and political bodies at the national or subnational level voluntarily comply even with EU-​level decisions they do not like:  EU-​wide parliamentary democracy as a quick fix for the European Union’s democratic deficit.

9.5 A PAN–​E UROPEAN UNION CONSTITUENCY WITH DEMOI-​C RATIC FEATURES

This straightforward transposition of country-​level democracy is too simplistic, however, because it underestimates the challenges posed by the national and linguistic segmentation of the European demos. To start with, one should not expect the European Parliament to be much better than the European Council at activating the educational and civilizing forces on the EU scale, as long as its members are electorally accountable, directly or via their party, only to national electorates. Not only will their campaigning tend to be circumscribed to their respective member-​states, but even when seemingly addressing their colleagues in the hemicycle, they will be thinking primarily of the sound bites likely to reach their home audiences. The civilizing force of hypocrisy may work a bit better for the benefit of the common European interest in this public forum than behind the closed doors of the council, but here again, the perimeter of the civilizing impact is ultimately determined by the an insightful analysis of why we should expect this to be the case, see Philip Manow and Holger Döring, “Electoral and Mechanical Causes of Divided Government in the European Union,” Comparative Political Studies 41, no. 10 (2007): 1349–​70, at 8–​9.

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perimeter of the electorate. Hence the relevance of the proposal, now made again and again, of a pan-​European electoral constituency for a fraction (say, 5 percent or 10 percent) of the seats of the European Parliament.12 Belgium’s experience as a federal country without federal parties has convinced me that this is definitely the direction in which we need to go.13 The proposal does not assume the prior existence of cohesive pan-​European political parties. On the contrary, it is centrally motivated by their absence. But the fine print of the proposal has great importance for its effects. First, it is important that more should be at stake in this constituency than the party composition of 5 or 10 percent of the Parliament. Along the path trodden by the Lisbon Treaty, the leader of the list that wins most votes in this EU-​wide constituency—​or alternatively, the person who is nominated by a majority of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) elected in this constituency—​would automatically become president of the European Commission. This should strengthen the incentive for each party to have its list led by a prominent personality with a transnational appeal. By boosting the likely turnout, and by creating a more direct link between the electorate and the leader of the executive, this could strengthen the feeling, among European citizens, that the European Union’s leadership was chosen by them and could be thrown out by them on the next occasion, and hence they can legitimately expect to be obeyed for the time being. More important, higher stakes would strengthen the incentive to form transnational lists for this EU-​ wide constituency and thereby enhance the extent to which the educational force of vote fishing and the civilizing force of hypocrisy would operate on the EU scale. Second, no less important is the possibility for candidates to run at the same time in this EU-​wide constituency and with a subnational constituency.

12. See, e.g., Mathias Dewatripont et al., Flexible Integration: Towards a More Effective and Democratic Europe (London: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 1996), 17, 165–​ 67; Van Parijs, “Should the European Union Become More Democratic?” 74; Gérard Onesta, Bruxelles en Europe/​L’Europe à Bruxelles (Bordeaux, France:  Le Castor Astral, 2007), 191; Daniel Cohn-​Bendit, “Cohn-​Bendit Rêve de Conduire Une Vraie Liste Verte Européenne,” Le Soir, November 12, 2010; Charles-​Ferdinand Nothomb, Un Plan de Paix Pour la Belgique (Brussels:  Racine, 2009), 169; Yves Desmet, “Kieskring,” De Morgen, April 20, 2011. It was included in the proposals of the European liberals for the Convention: ELDR, “Liberals and the Future of Europe,” Brussels, January 24, 2003. A  report that included the proposal of an EU-​wide constituency with 25 MEPs was presented in May 2010 by Andrew Duff (LibDem MEP) to the European Parliament’s Committee on Constitutional Affairs. The latter endorsed it, but not the plenary assembly. 13. See Kris Deschouwer and Philippe Van Parijs, Electoral Engineering for a Stalled Federation:  A Country-​wide Electoral District for Belgium’s Federal Parliament, with comments by L. de Briey, D. Horowitz, B. Maddens, and B. O’Leary (Brussels: Re-​Bel e-​ book no. 4, www.rethinkingbelgium.eu). See also the documents collected on the website of the Pavia Group (www.paviagroup.be). [ 224 ]  Philippe Van Parijs

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With the possibility of this double candidacy, political parties will place on the EU-​wide constituency most of their most appealing candidates, even if they have no chance of being elected in this constituency. As a result, far more than the 5 percent or 10 percent of the MEPs actually elected in the latter will end up having done some campaigning at the EU level. The loose European federations of national political parties that now form some of the parliamentary groups will thereby be induced to negotiate a common program on which all their national components will have to campaign, not just in the EU-​wide constituency, but also in the subnational constituencies. For all these federations, and in particular those vying for top European positions, both the educational and the civilizing force will therefore systematically operate at the level of the whole of the European Union far more than is currently the case for members of the European Parliament, let alone for the members of the European Council, or indeed of the national parliaments. Third, in this attempt to strengthen the demos-​ cratic aspect of the functioning of the European Union, one should not lose sight of the fact that the European demos is highly fragmented. The institutional setup must be sensitive to this aspect, both for each of the fragments to feel that the rulers are their choice and for the educational and civilizing mechanisms to work best. It must therefore incorporate what could be viewed as “consociational” or indeed “demoi-​cratic” features.14 Thus, the EU-​wide constituency must be designed so as to guarantee more or less proportional representation of the various national components of the European Union, for example by imposing national quotas among the elected (conceivably with smaller countries grouped together). Some guaranteed representation of this sort is important for three reasons. First, for the disciplining effect to work best in all segments of the European demos, one needs to secure an adequate presence of the smaller member-​ states, and therefore to prevent an overrepresentation of the candidates from the bigger countries, for whom it is easier to gain notoriety beyond their borders. Second, in the absence of quotas of this sort, there is a risk that voters will be more reluctant to vote for foreigners for fear of their own country being underrepresented. Once they anticipate this reluctance, candidates would be less bothered to court votes all over the European Union, and the working of

14.  This “consociational” or “demoi-​cratic” modulation of the European Union’s demos-​ cracy obviously operates against the background of an allocation of competences that could itself be characterized as strongly consociational or demoi-​ cratic:  the European Union’s national and linguistic diversity justifies a particularly stringent interpretation of the subsidiarity principle. When citizens in different territorial components speak different languages and possess sharply distinct collective identities, there is a strong case for keeping many competences strongly entrenched at the level of a multiplicity of strong national demoi which can function in the native language of most citizens.

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both the educational and the civilizing mechanism would thereby be impaired. Finally, if national quotas are imposed among the elected, it is natural to also impose them on the composition of the lists. It follows that only those party federations with candidates from all over the European Union will be able to present full lists, and also that there will be no loss in terms of the number of candidates that can be presented to the voters if all national components of a federation present a single list, rather than one list per country. As a result, the incentive to present a common transnational list will be overwhelming. And it is only if most of the candidates appear on such lists that the mechanisms can produce the intended effects.

9.6 A SWISS RECIPE?

One may grant that the setup specified here will do better with regard to all three justifications of democracy than the present one: A European government formed by a personality who has to win an election by facing the whole of the EU electorate and having to justify its policies to a Parliament consisting of parties and personalities electorally accountable far more than now to the EU population as a whole. Some believe, however, that this model would remain fundamentally defective, and it would do precious little to reduce the “democratic deficit.” They may grant that the current lack of luster of the European Parliament’s personalities, the lack of visibility of its debates, and the low turnout at European elections may have something to do with contingent features that the institutional reform sketched here would help remove. But they also will insist that there are intrinsic reasons why electoral accountability and hence democratic legitimacy are weaker at the European than at the national level. The voters’ rational tendency to ignore and abstain weighs unavoidably more when each vote is 1 out of 400 million rather than 1 out of 5, 10, or even 50. Even if the European Commission were turned into a government dependent on a parliamentary majority, the citizens’ feeling that they could “throw out the rascals” would unavoidably remain more far-​fetched than at the national level. And the distance from European politics is further increased for most citizens by the fact that the bulk of it is conducted in languages different from their own. This limit intrinsic to a demos-​cratic approach at the European level lends credibility to the “demoi-​cratic” impulse to create legitimacy through giving a greater role to national parliaments. However, as mentioned before, an involvement of national parliaments can be expected to do even worse than the current involvement of national executives in terms of the two mechanisms—​ educational and civilizing—​that could help European decision-​makers to be steered by a European general interest. [ 226 ]  Philippe Van Parijs

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There is, however, a different “demoi-​ cratic,” or at least national-​ segmentation-​sensitive, inflection that would not have this negative effect, while it would prevent a straightforward majoritarian demos-​cratic approach from running the risk of being counterproductive in terms of democratic legitimacy. The legitimacy in the voters’ eyes of the decisions taken by a government may be less affected by the actual possibility of throwing it out than by the degree to which they can identify with it. Inspiration may be garnered from Switzerland’s quasi-​unique government formula.15 Not only has there been an old and strong custom, officialized under the latest revision of the constitution, to the effect that the country’s Germanic and Latin components should be fairly represented in the seven-​ person executive (the Federal Council).16 In addition, the election by the Parliament (the 200 members of the National Council and the 46 members of the Council of States) of the members of the Federal Council has consistently perpetuated the “magic formula,” i.e., essentially a proportional representation in the Federal Council of the parties represented in the National Council. This “magic formula” is by no means the automatic outcome of the voting procedure. As the seven members of the Federal Council are elected sequentially under a simple majority system, a party coalition that includes more than 50  percent of the members of parliament could elect an executive drawn entirely from its ranks in a constitutionally impeccable way. It is apparently the fear of hostile popular initiatives that would keep stalling the political process that dissuades parliamentary majorities from evicting other parties. This sounds like a recipe for boring politics and laborious reforms and, worse still, it would seem to make it practically impossible to “throw out the rascals.” At the same time, however, this most unusual feature may be a key factor in securing the democratic legitimacy of the Swiss federal state. Not only is there a guarantee that voices (and ears) from Switzerland’s two main linguistic communities will be present at each government meeting. In 15. It is unique in national democracies and in systems that have been functioning for a long time. However, the formula adopted in Northern Ireland in 1998 as a result of the Good Friday Agreement imposes proportional representation in the executive of the parties present in the Assembly. For a presentation and defense of this formula, see, for example, Brendan O’Leary, “Belgium and Its Thoughtful Electoral Engineers,” in Deschouwer and Van Parijs, Electoral Engineering for a Stalled Federation, 31–​39. For an insightful discussion of the relevance of some other aspects of the Swiss political system for the European Union, see Joseph Lacey, “Must Europe Be Swiss? On the Idea of a Voting Space and the Possibility of a Multilingual Demos,” British Journal of Political Science 44, no. 1 (2014): 61–​82. 16.  Article 175 of the 1999 Constitution states that “the various regions and linguistic communities must be fairly represented in the Federal Council.” After decades of discussion, this formulation replaced one contained in article 1 of the 1848 Constitution, which required that no canton should have more than one representative in the Federal Council.

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addition, the parties in power in each of the cantons (whose governments are elected directly by the people) are most likely to be represented in the federal government. For the perception of democratic legitimacy, and hence for the willing compliance of both citizens and cantons, it may well be less important to enable the people to dismiss an unsatisfactory government than to prevent this government from consisting only of “foreigners,” or of a political color deprived of any intersection with many cantonal governments, which could therefore yield more easily to the temptation of questioning a federal authority run by “foreigners.”17 What does this suggest for the European Union? First, a balanced representation of the various national components of the European Union in the executive should be preserved. It does not follow that one should stick to the increasingly cumbersome formula of one commissioner per country. Just as Switzerland’s Federal Council does not have one member from each of its 26 cantons, however tiny, the European Union’s executive does not need to have one member from each of its 28 member-​states, large and small. To be more effective, the Commission needs to shrink. But strong rules, formal or informal, should prevent having more than one member from the same country, and they secure a balance presence of, say, the East and the West, the North and the South. But the Swiss case suggests more than this. It also suggests, second, that one should reject a simple party—​political majoritarian formula in favor of some sort of proportional representation. Especially if only a subset of the member-​states is represented in the Commission, the segmented nature of the European demos could easily lead to the legitimacy of EU-​level decisions being jeopardized by the perception that they are being made by “foreigners.” And the temptation on the part of national governments to present what emanates from the EU executive as illegitimate foreign rule would be particularly strong when a left-​of-​center national government faces a right-​of-​center European government or the other way round. Hence the suggestion that the main political forces should be represented, more systematically than the EU executive and more explicitly than now, in the EU executive. This Helvetic segmentation-​sensitive inflection of what remains essentially a demos-​cratic model seems to me a more promising formula than attempts

17.  This suggests an important interaction between the election-​ based “Greek strategy” and the identity-​based “German strategy” (both distinguished from the output-​based “Roman strategy”) for securing the loyalty of the relevant public, to use van Middelaar’s suggestive terminology (Luuk van Middelaar, De Passage naar Europa. Geschiedenis van een begin. Groningen:  Historische Uitgeverij. English edition:  The Passage to Europe. How a Continent Became a Union, New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2013.) For the elected to command our allegiance most effectively, they need to be perceived as being some of “us” and elected by “us,” not as “foreigners” elected by “foreigners.” [ 228 ]  Philippe Van Parijs

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to enhance democratic legitimacy either by adopting an unadulterated majoritarian model copied straight from national parliamentary democracies or by giving a larger role to national parliaments in European decision-​making. Undeniably, the constraint thereby imposed on the composition of the executive and hence on the orientation of its policies reduces what is at stake in the European parliamentary election, including in its pan-​European constituency, and consequently weakens the incentive for political parties and their leaders to gather information and address concerns on a European scale (our first two mechanisms). Moreover, the feeling that the people can really decide who rules the country is likely to suffer (our third mechanism). However, like in Switzerland, the inability to throw out the rascals may be mitigated by the ability to throw out what they decided through a referendum at the citizens’ request. Given the size of the population involved, the procedure would need to be significantly different from the Swiss one. The European Citizens’ Initiatives provide a very modest experiment in the direction of what might do the trick.

9.7 PRESIDENT GAUCK’S PRAKTIKABLES ENGLISCH

With or without such segmentation-​sensitive features, it is clear that anything like an EU-​wide demos-​cracy can hope to work satisfactorily only if its linguistic preconditions are far better satisfied than they currently are. In particular, providing an electoral incentive to collect information from all over the Union and to develop an inclusive rhetoric will not be very effective as long as communication is exceedingly laborious across the boundaries of member-​ states, as long as candidates and electors do not understand each other because they have no language in common. As emphasized in this chapter, the functioning of a democracy is not just a matter of electoral institutions, but also of preelectoral and postelectoral conversation. Given Europe’s linguistic diversity, an EU-​level demos-​cracy is a pipe dream in the absence of widespread multilingualism or at least, more specifically and more realistically, of a widespread convergence toward a common lingua franca. As German president Joachim Gauck recently put it: Europe does not have a single European public space which could be compared to what we regard as a public sphere at national level. First of all we lack a lingua franca. There are 23 official languages in Europe, plus countless other languages and dialects. A German who does not also speak English or French will find it difficult to communicate with someone from Portugal, or from Lithuania or Hungary. It is true to say that young people are growing up with English as the lingua franca. However, I  feel that we should not simply let things take their course when it comes to linguistic integration. For more Europe means

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multilingualism not only for the elites but also for ever larger sections of the population, for ever more people, for everyone! I am convinced that feeling at home in one’s native language and its magic and being able to speak enough English to get by in all situations and at all ages can exist alongside each other in Europe. A  common language would make it easier to realize my wish for Europe’s future—​a European agora, a common forum for discussion to enable us to live together in a democratic order.18

The democratization of a lingua franca—​“ein praktikables Englisch für alle Lebenslagen und Lebensalter,” as President Gauck put it—​consistent with the protection of national languages is a fundamental feature of the democratic set up the European Union needs, and one which goes beyond a simple transposition of national models, whether interpreted as practising linguistic imposition or linguistic indifference. A demos that does its job properly is not only one in which people talk and argue with each other about what is best or fairest for them to decide. It is also one in which people and associations—​and not only the wealthiest and most powerful ones—​can coordinate and mobilize. Failing this, the European demos will never manage to do what it urgently needs to do, namely, turn the European Union into a caring polity, one that can take over some of the social protection tasks member-​states can no longer perform properly, while at the same time securing the survival and diversity of existing welfare states.19 Coordination and mobilization of the main beneficiaries of such action require an effective and cheap medium of communication, which can only—​realistically—​be English.20 As asserted by Joachim Gauck and confirmed by the most recent data, competence in English is spreading fast from generation to generation throughout the European Union. 21 But it could and should be accelerated. One of the main obstacles to a more voluntaristic policy is the feeling that giving a massive official privilege to the native language of most of the citizens of one of the biggest member-​states would be blatantly unfair. This problem needs to be addressed

18.  Joachim Gauck, “Europa:  Vertrauen erneuern—​Verbindlichkeit stärken,” Rede von Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck zu Perspektiven der europäischen Idee am 22, in Schloss Bellevue (February 2013). Here is the original version of the striking final passage:  “Ich bin überzeugt, dass in Europa beides nebeneinander leben kann:  die Beheimatung in der eigenen Muttersprache und in ihrer Poesie und ein praktikables Englisch für alle Lebenslagen und Lebensalter. Mit einer gemeinsamen Sprache ließe sich auch mein Wunschbild für das künftige Europa leichter umsetzen: eine europäische Agora, ein gemeinsamer Diskussionsraum für das demokratische Miteinander.” 19. See the argument behind the Euro-​dividend proposal in Philippe Van Parijs, “The Euro-​Dividend,” www.socialeurope.eu, March 7, 2013. 20. The argument of this paragraph is developed in c­ hapter 1 of Van Parijs, Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 21. See languageknowledge.eu.

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in all its dimensions,22 but it should not stand in the way of the European Union frankly reappropriating a European idiom consisting of a mixture of its two main continental languages, not as a substitute for its many national languages, but as an effective means of cross-​border communication and mobilization. The European Union would thereby equip its demos with an essential precondition for all three forces that make democracy worth having to operate most effectively at the right level: the educational force of vote fishing, the civilizing force of hypocrisy, and the disciplining force of self-​infliction.

22. See Van Parijs, Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World, chs. 2–​5. Incidentally, note that this problem of linguistic unfairness is less acute within the current (and likely future) borders of the Eurozone, which is the area in which a new way of organizing ourselves politically is most urgently needed. Nearly 87  percent of the European Union’s native Anglophones live in the United Kingdom. In the rest of the European Union, fewer than 2 percent have English as their native tongue, most of them in Ireland (computed from languageknowledge.eu. According to Eurobarometer 2012, 87.4  percent of the UK population and 12.9  percent of the EU27 population have English as their native tongue). Hence, a Euroland that is more assertive about the choice of English as its medium of communication would not give a privilege to a significant part of its citizens, but only to the population of part of an island which had English imposed on it.

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CHAPTER 10

Cosmopolitan Justice, Democracy, and the World State C ATHERINE LU  

10.1 INTRODUCTION

Cosmopolitanism is a universalistic morality that endorses an idea of shared or universal moral duties toward others by virtue of their common humanity, while eschewing parochial, especially national, limitations or prejudices.1 Although normative theorists of global justice and order all claim to

   Previous versions of this chapter were presented at conferences while on an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research fellowship with the Justitia Amplificata research group at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany (2012), and on a Research School of Social Sciences fellowship with the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University (2013), as well as at a Research Group on Constitutional Studies workshop at McGill University (2013), an International Studies Association catalytic workshop in San Francisco (2013), a conference on the world state at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2014), and at the fourth Global International Studies conference of the World International Studies Committee in Frankfurt, Germany (2014). The author wishes to thank all the organizers and participants of these events, and especially Laura Valentini, Lea Ypi, Luis Cabrera, and Benjamin Herborth, as well as an anonymous reviewer for this edited volume, for their critical and constructive comments. 1. See Catherine Lu, “The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 244–​67, at 245. Thomas Pogge’s classic formulation of cosmopolitanism involves three features—​individualism, universality, and generality—​ that support the principle that “every human being has a global stature as an ultimate unit of moral concern.” Thomas Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics 103, no. 1 (1992): 48–​75, at 48–​49.

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acknowledge some form of moral cosmopolitanism,2 Lea Ypi recently argued that since cosmopolitan duties are duties of justice, not charity, cosmopolitanism “entails committing politically to the establishment of a global political authority representing all states and enforcing cosmopolitan obligations in a fair, impartial, and consistent manner.”3 If this is right, then cosmopolitanism, in its political and institutional implications, poses a more radical challenge than acknowledged, especially to those contemporary democratic theorists who explicitly reject the idea of a world state or global government. Seyla Benhabib has already observed that a cosmopolitan commitment to viewing all human beings as moral persons entitled to legal protection of the rights they possess in virtue of their humanity presents “challenges to contemporary democracies to reevaluate and reshape their own practices in accordance with the universalistic ideals that are already embodied in their own constitutions.”4 But can those who are committed to democratic principles and values reconcile themselves with cosmopolitanism if the latter entails a political commitment to world state formation? Democratic objections to institutional cosmopolitanism question the feasibility, desirability, and necessity of realizing cosmopolitan moral commitments through a world state. While some democratic theorists have embraced various forms of institutional cosmopolitanism, most notably cosmopolitan democracy,5 this chapter is concerned mainly with those democratic theorists who continue to view the nation-​state as the morally appropriate home for realizing democratic principles and values, in particular of collective self-​determination and egalitarian distributive justice. If democratic self-​ determination and justice presuppose a political community that constitutes itself “as a political unit with clear rules governing the relations between the 2. According to Mathias Risse, all theorists of global justice “live on a ‘cosmopolitan plateau.’ ” Mathias Risse, On Global Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 10. 3.  Lea Ypi, “Cosmopolitanism Without If and Without But,” in Gillian Brock, ed., Cosmopolitanism Versus Non-​cosmopolitanism:  Critiques, Defences, Reconceptualizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 75–​91. Luis Cabrera has also argued that “full acknowledgement of the demands of moral cosmopolitanism also should commit us to strong institutional cosmopolitanism” in the form of a democratic global government; see Luis Cabrera, Political Theory of Global Justice:  A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State (London: Routledge, 2004), 2. 4. Seyla Benhabib, “Cosmopolitanism and Democracy: Affinities and Tensions,” The Hedgehog Review (2009) 30–​41, at 41. 5.  See David Held, Democracy and the Global Order:  From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1995); Raffaele Marchetti, Global Democracy, For and Against:  Ethical Theory, Institutional Design, and Social Struggles (London:  Routledge, 2008); Daniele Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Torbjörn Tännsjö, Global Democracy:  The Case for a World Government (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

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inside and the outside,” can future “democratic iterations” support a move toward a global constitutionalism that, at least with respect to the scope and content of cosmopolitan justice, no longer effectively distinguishes between the inside and the outside?6 I will argue that being a good democrat in the twenty-​first century requires, rather than precludes, engaging in both domestic and international political reform and struggle that will culminate in the establishment of a world state, or a global political authority that can command and enforce duties of cosmopolitan justice. I  view cosmopolitan justice as an essential subset of global justice, in the sense that cosmopolitan justice only elucidates the duties we owe to human beings qua their humanity and status as moral persons. Cosmopolitan justice constitutes the background essential supporting conditions for the proper functioning and legitimacy of domestic, regional, and global political orders. Under contemporary global circumstances, the effective realization of cosmopolitan justice requires institutional cosmopolitanism in the form of an impartial global political authority that can adjudicate and enforce the rights and duties of states so that they are consistent with their cosmopolitan duties. Against communitarian, nationalist, liberal, and republican democratic theorists who worry that establishing such a global political authority would undermine or extinguish the democratic value of collective self-​determination, I  argue that under global conditions that fail to realize effectively cosmopolitan justice, we lack the background essential supporting conditions that are required at the global level for validating the legitimacy of self-​determination claims by any (even internally democratic) bounded political community. In other words, the normative value of internally democratic self-​determination presupposes and depends on the realization of global background conditions that instantiate cosmopolitan justice. In addition, democrats concerned with legitimizing the democratic principle of (bounded) collective self-​determination in a world in which the political proj­ ect of decolonization is still an unfinished task should be especially concerned to realize cosmopolitan justice as a background condition for ensuring that statist and nation-​based claims of democratic self-​determination do not reproduce colonial political structures and relations, especially with relation to indigenous peoples, as well as other groups forcibly incorporated into settler colonial and postcolonial states. My view can also be distinguished from the arguments of those democratic theorists who have embraced institutional cosmopolitanism in the form of cosmopolitan democracy. Justifying the world state based on cosmopolitan 6. Benhabib, “Cosmopolitanism and Democracy,” 30. See also Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism:  Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations, with responses by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig, and Will Kymlicka (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006). [ 234 ] Catherine Lu

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justice leaves open the question of whether the global political structures that form the world state must be modeled along cosmopolitan democratic lines. It is conceivable that a full conception of global justice, beyond cosmopolitan justice, may necessitate global democracy, or global political structures that enable individuals to maximize their participatory democratic agency. My argument for a world state acknowledges that under current global conditions, we cannot know what a globally just world order entails because absent cosmopolitan justice, any terms of global political and distributive justice that are negotiated by contemporary agents, even those based on voluntary consent or agreement, cannot be validated as terms that reflect basic moral reciprocity among morally relevant agents. Only as we approximate the realization of cosmopolitan justice, which requires world state formation, can we arrive at a global political condition in which the outcomes of global debates about collective self-​determination and global political and distributive justice can be considered legitimate and morally binding on all those subjected to political orders based on such principles. The establishment of a global political authority is required, first, to realize cosmopolitan justice, and second, to determine and enforce any other additional principles of global justice that may be appropriate due to the evolution of historical conditions of human social and political relations at the global level.7 A commitment to moral cosmopolitanism and to the value of collective self-​determination, as well as to any robust account of global justice, requires democrats to dream beyond a Rawlsian or republican law of liberal democratic or decent peoples, and to embrace world state formation.

10.2 DEMOCRATIC ARGUMENTS AGAINST A WORLD STATE

Historically, democratic theorists have been concerned with the global context of order and justice due to its importance for establishing protective external conditions for the moral and political achievements of centuries of domestic political struggle. Today, many democratic theorists and activists worry about the homogenizing and alienating effects of globalization or global

7.  This argument shares affinities with Simon Caney’s endorsement of a system of international institutions designed to “provide a reliable and effective means of protecting people’s basic interests (an instrumental consideration) and also to provide a fair forum for determining which rules should govern the global economy (a procedural component).” Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice and Institutional Design: An Egalitarian Liberal Conception of Global Governance,” Social Theory and Practice 32, 4 (2006):  725–​56, at 734. While Caney’s formulation of the procedural component mainly attempts to address inequalities between states in determining rules for governing the global economy, my understanding of cosmopolitan justice calls into question statist assumptions of status and agency in global governance.

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capitalism undermining the achievements of democratic societies in areas of civil and social rights such as access to political participation, education, and healthcare, and the economic securities provided by the welfare state. Some democrats are also concerned that the growing power of governmental and bureaucratic institutions and organizations at the international and transnational levels poses a potential threat to democratic, indigenous, and local self-​ determination or autonomy that sustains social and culture pluralism, civic equality, and nonrepresentational forms of political participation.8 For some democratic skeptics of the world state, a commitment to collective self-​determination is typically tied to a defense of state sovereignty and a presumption that the state (though not always in practice) is “the arena within which self-​determination is worked out.”9 Michael Walzer, for example, views “sovereign statehood” as an instrumentally valuable institution for “protecting distinct historical cultures, sometimes national, sometimes ethnic/​religious in character.” He rejects a centralized global order due to the risks of such an institutional development increasing oppression and stifling cultural and social diversity.10 Eschewing even a united federation of nation-​states, Walzer thinks that a world of distinct and politically autonomous communities, enmeshed in “a dense web of social ties,” and actively participating in international and regional organizations, may be important to curbing the appetite of a hegemonic global state to remake the world in its own image. For human beings “like us, all-​too-​real and no more than intermittently reasonable,” Walzer argues that our interests in peace and security, equality and justice, liberty and autonomy, and diversity and pluralism “are best pursued politically in circumstances where there are many avenues of pursuit, many agents in pursuit. The dream of a single agent—​the enlightened despot, the civilizing imperium, the communist vanguard, the global state—​is a delusion.”11 David Miller also considers it infeasible that a world state can accommodate the democratic principle of collective, especially national, self-​determination, respect cultural diversity, or ensure effective democratic accountability. As Miller has put it, the idea of a world state runs “contrary to the sheer diversity of human cultures, and to the wish of people everywhere to belong to communities that are able to determine their own future paths.”12 Political 8.  See Jürgen Habermas, The Divided West, Ciaran Cronin, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 9.  Michael Walzer, “The Moral Standing of States:  A Response to Four Critics,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (1980): 209–​29. 10.  Michael Walzer, “Governing the Globe:  What Is the Best We Can Do?” Dissent 47, no. 4 (2000): 44–​52, at 45 and 46; reprinted in Michael Walzer, Arguing About War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 172 and 176. 11. Walzer, “Governing the Globe,” 44–​51. 12. David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 26. [ 236 ] Catherine Lu

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philosophy “for Earthlings” should aim to be action-​guiding, and therefore must devise principles of justice that are fact-​dependent and that would not be considered by agents as fundamentally unacceptable or “abhorrent.” A political principle that requires the abolition of the family to achieve social justice would be an example of a normatively infeasible principle, falling outside the realm of practical possibility.13 Is this also true of principles of cosmopolitan justice which would require a world state for their successful realization? Craig Calhoun has argued, “In the modern era, nationalism is the discursive formation that has most influentially underwritten [the social cohesion and agency of the demos in] democratic practice.”14 A  world state, in destroying the institutional basis for fostering national identity and solidarity, may undermine the sustainability of democratic self-​determination or egalitarian distributive justice. Partly, this objection stems from an account, most notably forwarded by Miller, of the importance of affective associational ties—​provided in the domestic context by a national collective identity—​to motivating people to act in accordance with principles of justice that might require some to sacrifice parochial gains for the common good.15 A world state, absent a global collective identity, would not be able to provide a motivational basis for any demanding form of justice, at least not a very robust egalitarian conception, which, democrats might argue, has been motivationally sustainable in a national context.16 While the feasibility and desirability of a world state may be challenged on the grounds of democratic legitimacy (because it counters collective self-​ determination) and effectiveness (because it fails to provide agents with the proper or sufficient motivational basis for complying with demanding principles of egalitarian distributive justice), some also think that a world state may be unnecessary for achieving cosmopolitan aims. John Rawls, for example, advances the concept of a “Society of Peoples,” governed by principles based on recognition of the freedom and equality of peoples. A  well-​ ordered Society of Peoples regulated by the “Law of Peoples” would be one in which cosmopolitan justice in the form of basic human rights “would be secured everywhere,” since all well-​ordered peoples by definition would meet the criterion of honoring human rights. Institutionally, such a society would 13. Miller, Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 33–​37. 14.  Craig Calhoun, Nations Matter:  Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (London: Routledge, 2007), 147. 15. David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), ch. 3. For a discussion of the mixed results from empirical investigations of this claim, see David Miller and Sundas Ali, “Testing the National Identity Argument,” European Political Science Review 6, 2 (2014): 237–​59. 16. For a fuller discussion and rejection of this argument, see Laura Valentini, “No Global Demos, No Global Democracy? A Systematization and Critique,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 4 (2014): 789–​807.

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develop “new institutions and practices . . . to constrain outlaw states” and to promote human rights, as well as “make room for various forms of cooperative associations and federations among peoples, but will not affirm a world state.”17 Rawls explicitly states his reason for rejecting the idea of a world state, or “a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central governments”: it “would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their political freedom and autonomy.”18 Similarly, Philip Pettit’s republican vision presupposes the legitimacy of domestic democracies that ensure nondomination as a starting point for thinking about a legitimate international order. According to his neorepublican theory of freedom, the republican democratic commitment to the ideal of nondomination entails reducing people’s vulnerability to alien control or the arbitrary power of others to interfere with their choices and their lives.19 Starting with a world of states, Pettit argues that a state which is “effective and representative of its people” fulfills the republican ideal of nondomination, and “it would be objectionably intrusive of other agents in the international order” to bypass such states and assume responsibility for its members. The sources of domination in the international context include other states; “non-​domestic, private bodies” such as “corporations, churches, terrorist movements, even powerful individuals”; and “non-​domestic, public bodies” such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). While effective and representative states realize nondomination internally for their members, individuals’ enjoyment of freedom as nondomination is not secured unless their states are protected in their external relations from dominating strategies, including “intentional obstruction, coercion, deception, and manipulation,” as well as “invigilation” and “intimidation.” A legitimate international order is one “in which effective, representative states avoid domination—​whether by another state, or by a nonstate body—​and seek to enable other states to be effective and representative too.” In forwarding a “republican law of peoples,” Pettit also explicitly rejects the idea of a world state, modeled on a domestic republican

17. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 93, 48, and 36. 18. Ibid., 111 and 36. On the problematic interpretation of and reliance on Kant for this rejection of the idea of a world state, see Nancy Kokaz, “Institutions for Global Justice,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (2005):  65–​107; Catherine Lu, “World Government,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2006 Ed.), http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​win2006/​entries/​world-​government/​; and Thomas Pogge, “Kant’s Vision of a Just World Order,” in T. E. Hill, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Kant’s Ethics (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2009), 196–​208. 19. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). [ 238 ] Catherine Lu

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regime, as an infeasible remedy for the challenges posed by domination in an international context.20 These lines of argument raise the question of why we should conceptualize just global background conditions in terms of cosmopolitan justice—​that refers to claims of justice between individual human beings—​as opposed to “statist” justice, that refers to claims of justice between well-​ordered peoples or internally legitimate states (that respect their citizens’ fundamental rights). While statist justice might still entail institution-​building at the international level, the necessary institutions arguably need not amount to a global state.21

10.3 WHY THE (LIBERAL OR REPUBLICAN) LAW OF PEOPLES IS NOT ENOUGH: CHALLENGES OF GLOBAL LEGITIMATION AND GLOBAL DOMINATION

While critical of institutional cosmopolitanism in the form of a world state, democratic theorists—​ of communitarian, national, liberal, and republican varieties—​do not deny cosmopolitan moral obligations. Instead, they have posited that the most morally desirable as well as most normatively, politically, and practically feasible institutional context in which to realize cosmopolitan justice is a well-​ordered society of peoples, or effective and representative states. Such a society of peoples or group of states would be supplemented by supranational institutions or international organizations (IOs) and transnational civil society, all coordinating and cooperating to discharge certain intersocietal common duties, including those arising from a moral commitment to honoring cosmopolitan duties of justice. The upshot of these arguments is that a global political authority is not necessary to discharge duties of cosmopolitan justice. The reluctance to embrace a global political authority stems partly from a concern to preserve the value of collective self-​determination. The assertion of this value presupposes that when a political community meets the internal criteria for political legitimacy, it can rightfully claim external legitimacy vis-​ à-​vis other groups/​peoples/​states and international or global institutions. Pettit’s method, for example, starts with “relevant domain agents with a certain claim to legitimacy,” and then addresses recommendations to those 20.  Philip Pettit, “A Republican Law of Peoples,” European Journal of Political Theory, 9 (2010):  70–​94, at 71, 73, 74, and 81. But see Mathias Koenig-​Archibugi, “Is Global Democracy Possible?” European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 3 (2011): 519–​42. 21.  I  thank Laura Valentini for helping me to formulate this question. See Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 165, 150, and 163; see also Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” 63.

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agents.22 The idea is to build up a normative action-​guiding theory of global justice starting with agents that satisfy the internal criteria of political legitimacy. Presupposing the legitimacy of bounded democratic peoples or states, this approach then asks how such agents, entitled to collective self-​ determination, may cooperate to establish international, multilateral, and/​ or transnational institutions, processes, and practices in order to achieve intersocietal peace, nondomination, protection of individual human rights, and respect for social and cultural diversity, as well as group autonomy or self-​determination. The problems with unilateral assertions of legitimacy claims in a global context are similar to those facing individuals in the state of nature.23 Issues of indeterminacy, moral disagreement, and unilateralism related to interpreting, applying, and enforcing principles of justice in the state of nature of individuals mean that even well-​meaning individuals cannot feasibly fulfill their duties of justice to each other. The moral significance of the state, according to Anna Stilz, is that it provides the institutional conditions that make fulfilling duties of justice feasible normatively, politically, and practically.24 Applied to the global context, we can say that even well-​meaning individual states will find it difficult or impossible to fulfill their duties of global justice, even their basic duties of cosmopolitan justice, absent a global political authority. Even if all states acknowledge the moral validity of cosmopolitan moral principles, they can disagree on the specific rights and duties that such principles entail for various agents.25 Differences in interpretation will lead to indeterminacy or disagreement, which cannot be resolved without an institution that can serve as an “omnilateral arbiter and enforce of everyone’s rights” and duties.26 Doing justice requires an authoritative procedure to resolve disagreements; otherwise, each agent can only act unilaterally and make unilateral demands on other agents. However, privately enforcing these demands offends the principle of the moral equality and freedom of agents, individually or collectively conceived. A  global political authority is thus required to promulgate “one public interpretation of our [cosmopolitan] rights and duties to one another.” Effectively realizing cosmopolitan justice requires the actions of all relevant agents fitting together under a coherent set of rules, and this is not likely to happen absent a world state. Endorsing any account of cosmopolitan justice thus requires all states to establish a global political authority to 22. Pettit, “A Republican Law of Peoples,” 91. 23. See also Ypi, “Cosmopolitanism Without If and Without But.” 24.  Anna Stilz, “Why Does the State Matter Morally?” in Sigal R. Ben-​Porath and Rogers M. Smith, eds., Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 244–​64, at 248. 25. See also Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice and Institutional Design.” 26. Stilz, “Why Does the State Matter Morally?,” 248. [ 240 ] Catherine Lu

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coordinate the interpretation, application, and enforcement of the relevant principles of cosmopolitan justice.27 For a world state to develop, states must renounce their claims to traditional sovereignty and “adapt themselves to public coercive laws, and thus form an international state (civitas gentium), which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of the earth.”28 Absent such an institutional development, it is difficult to see how states’ international human rights obligations can be fairly, impartially, and consistently determined and distributed. This is true even if we subscribe only to a minimal variant of cosmopolitan justice based on a restricted account of human rights. Consider the case of the world’s 50  million refugees, asylum-​seekers, and internally displaced persons fleeing generalized violent conflict or persecution, whose most basic claims of common humanity typically go unmet or unevenly met.29 Even David Miller acknowledges that from a normative point of view, “the obligation to offer protection [to refugees of their basic human rights] is shared among all those states that are able to provide refuge,” and he speculates that “in an ideal world one might envisage some formal mechanism for distributing refugees among them.” According to my argument, such a mechanism is an institutional implication of viewing the protection of refugees’ human rights as a matter of global justice, rather than of charity. In the absence of an authoritative global agency that can determine in a binding manner the rights and duties of states toward the world’s refugees, to advocate an institutional order in which states “are given considerable autonomy to decide on how to respond to particular asylum applications”30 is to forfeit one’s endorsement of cosmopolitan duties of justice, and to place refugees in a position of profound structural indignity and injustice from a cosmopolitan moral point of view. Another challenge to the supposed external legitimacy of internally well ordered political communities has to do with the deficiencies of contemporary background global conditions. Pettit’s criterion of effectiveness requires a state to be competent in providing basic services to its population, including enabling basic subsistence or sufficiency or capabilities, and maintaining basic rule-​of-​law conditions that reliably guarantee security against force and fraud. The criterion of representativeness requires states to establish institutional

27. I am extending Anna Stilz’s arguments about the moral significance of the state to a world state. Ibid., 248, 253, and 254. 28. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in H. B. Nisbet, trans., Hans Reiss, ed., Political Writings, 2nd ed. (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93–​130 at 105 (italics in original). 29.  See the United Nations Refugee Agency’s UNHCR Global Trends 2013 Report, http://​www.unhcr.org/​5399a14f9.html. In 2013, there were 16.7  million refugees worldwide, 1.2 million asylum-​seekers, and 33.3 million internally displaced persons. Developing countries hosted 86 percent of the world’s refugees. 30. Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice, 226.

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resources for democratic contestation, accountability, and control of governmental power. In this account, the criterion of effectiveness functions to denote decent or just background conditions of nondomination as part of the necessary criteria for internal political legitimacy. Democratic theorists have recognized that, in a domestic context of unjust, defective, or incompletely just background structural conditions, democratic institutions and processes may form a vicious circle that, while legitimate from a formal and procedural viewpoint, serves only to reproduce unjust outcomes or entrench patterns of inequity and domination. As Iris Marion Young put it, “In actually existing democracies there tends to be a reinforcing circle between social and economic inequality and political inequality that enables the powerful to use formally democratic processes to perpetuate injustice or preserve privilege.”31 Lacking just or decent background conditions, the formal institutions and processes of democratic decision-​making become captured by the agenda and interests of those in positions of social privilege, whose exercises of self-​determination tend to perpetuate their own advantage. In the global context, asserting an entitlement to collective self-​ determination will generate the same tendencies, given unjust global background conditions. In the area of trade, the priority of the self-​determination rights of states means that the World Trade Organization (WTO), a multilateral institution, is still incapable of enforcing compliance with international trade and labor rules against powerful states that can circumvent its diffuse enforcement mechanisms. For example, the United States recently agreed to pay Brazil a lump sum of $300 million to settle a dispute in front of the WTO’s Appellate Body, in which Brazil charged that “U.S. cotton subsidies were depressing world prices and hurting Brazilian farmers in the process.” As Krzysztof Pelc explains, “[T]‌he WTO relies on a decentralized enforcement system. There is no WTO public prosecutor or WTO attorney gen­ eral: No violation is challenged unless another member state files a formal complaint. And while this is meant to reassure states wary of ceding too much sovereignty to the institution, it also means that the system is ripe for collusion.”32 The bilateral settlement between the United States and Brazil means that the more than 10 million people in poor African states—​such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali—​who rely on cotton revenue, will continue 31.  Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002), 17. On the defects of democracies in global relations, see Daniele Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens, 5–​8. 32.  Krzysztof J. Pelc, “Why the Deal to Pay Brazil $300 Million Just to Keep U.S. Cotton Subsidies Is Bad for the WTO, Poor Countries, and U.S. Taxpayers,” Monkey Cage Blog, The Washington Post, October 12, 2014, http://​www.washingtonpost.com/​ blogs/​monkey-​cage/​wp/​2014/​10/​12/​why-​the-​deal-​to-​pay-​brazil-​300-​million-​just-​to-​ keep-​u-​s-​cotton-​subsidies-​is-​bad-​for-​the-​wto-​poor-​countries-​and-​u-​s-​taxpayers/​ [ 242 ] Catherine Lu

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to suffer the effects of depressed world prices caused by the subsidization of American farmers. Given the prohibitive financial and political costs of filing a WTO dispute, poor states suffer from structural injustices that undermine their ability to protect their legitimate interests against powerful states exercising their rights to self-​determination through bilateral agreements to flout the rules that constitute public justice in international trade.33 The presumption of external legitimacy, based on fulfillment of the internal criteria, is thus too quick, especially if such legitimacy establishes an entitlement to freedom from external interference or from requirements of external justification when fulfilling rules of cosmopolitan or global justice.34 The validity of claims of external legitimacy by groups claiming a right to collective self-​determination requires, at the least, externally decent background conditions in the global context. James Bohman, for example, has posited that “democracy [even when properly instituted at the domestic level] may better achieve justice for its own citizens, but not necessarily for those outside the polity.” According to Bohman, bounded democracies have formed vicious circles of “democratic domination” (a concept that is hardly intelligible within Pettit’s framework) rather than virtuous circles; in contemporary global circumstances, they have been part of the problem rather than the solution to global injustice and domination. Although Bohman does not endorse world state formation, his advocacy of “federal and regional projects of political integration” and transnational democratization entail a rejection of the external legitimacy of bounded democracies presumed by Pettit’s republican and Rawls’s liberal law of peoples.35 Bohman provides a reason from a democratic concern for legitimate and effective self-​determination and nondomination to endorse political cosmopolitanism—​ “a political community beyond the nation-​ state”—​ to meet the challenges of new, transnational forms of tyranny and domination.36 Although his idea of political cosmopolitanism is focused on regionalism and nonrepresentational forms of democratic participation in global civil society, Nancy Kokaz, in a republican interpretation of Rawls’s Law of Peoples, has argued that “a global republic cannot be dismissed by a civic [republican] theory of global justice.” The democratic ideals of self-​determination, civic equality, and social pluralism that are threatened by the advent of global capitalism

33. Ibid. 34. See Rainer Forst, The Right to Justification, trans. Jeffrey Flynn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 251–​66. 35.  James Bohman, “The Democratic Minimum:  Is Democracy a Means to Global Justice?” Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 1 (2005):  101–​16, at 102. See also James Bohman, Democracy Across Borders; From Demos to Dêmoi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 175 and 189. 36. James Bohman, “Republican Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 12, no. 3 (2004): 336–​52, at 336 and 340.

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and ensuing deracination requires “a global state powerful enough to protect local communities” from the homogenizing tendencies and “excesses of global capitalism.”37 Democratic theorists are thus wrong to presume the external legitimacy of internally well ordered peoples or internally effective and representative states as starting points for their theories of legitimate global order. Such peoples or states cannot claim a valid entitlement to collective self-​determination (understood as the freedom of self-​rule), entailing freedom from external interference or demand for external justification, under grossly unjust global background conditions that fail to realize cosmopolitan justice. Rather, they have an obligation to establish the institutional conditions for enforcing cosmopolitan duties—​a world state. In the new circumstances of global politics, a commitment to moral cosmopolitanism and to a principle of republican nondomination both entail rejecting the law of peoples as a normatively stable and feasible institutional basis for a legitimate or morally acceptable global order. Paradoxically, a world state would provide the essential supporting conditions for all states to enjoy effective, legitimate, though significantly more limited self-​determination.38 After all, a world state grounded on the realization of cosmopolitan justice need not collectivize on a global scale all culture, or all aspects of economy or local politics.39 What a cosmopolitan world state does require is a set of procedural rules for making binding collective decisions regarding the construction, interpretation, and effective realization of principles of cosmopolitan justice, and the agency to command and enforce cosmopolitan rights and obligations based on those decisions.40 37. Kokaz, “Institutions for Global Justice,” 93–​94. 38.  See Miriam Ronzoni, “Two Conceptions of State Sovereignty and Their Implications for Global Institutional Design,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 15, 5 (2012): 573–​91. 39.  See Alexander Wendt, “Why a World State Is Inevitable,” European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 4 (2003): 491–​542. 40. Thomas Pogge has juxtaposed a “multi-​layered scheme in which ultimate political authority is vertically dispersed,” and in which states retain ultimate political authority in some areas, with a world state with “central coercive mechanisms of law enforcement” that has ultimate political authority in other areas. See Pogge, “Kant’s Vision of a Just World Order,” 205–​6. See also Thomas Pogge, “Do Rawls’s Two Theories of Justice Fit Together?” in Rex Martin and David Reidy, eds., Rawls’s Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia? (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006), 206–​25. The vertical dispersal of powers would still have to be embedded within a global political authority that served as the ultimate arbiter of conflicts between various political units and levels when these conflicts are related to the construction, interpretation, application, and enforcement of cosmopolitan justice. For a more thorough critique of cosmopolitan rejections of a world state, see William E. Scheuerman, “Cosmopolitanism and the World State,” Review of International Studies 40, no. 3 (2014): 419–​41.

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Furthermore, emancipatory world state formation requires interpreting cosmopolitan rights and duties in the service of furthering the decolonization of global order, which entails repudiating the claims of states to exclusive and final authority to command and enforce binding rules over a particular finite population and territorial jurisdiction.41 In response to postcolonial and settler colonial conditions, a cosmopolitan world state would need to limit the authority of states to engage in forced incorporation or collectivization projects of assimilation that adversely affect indigenous peoples and other transboundary social groups.42 Indeed, the political struggles over the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples signify an acknowledgment by indigenous peoples that their concerns about continued usurpation, dispossession, deprivation, and assimilation are intricately associated with their “structural indignity” in international order.43 Theories of self-​ determination that are wedded to political projects that entail state-​ building or nation-​building along the lines of modern states, and do not problematize the political and territorial rights of state authorities to control people, land, and borders, cannot redress such structural injustices and alienation. An anticolonial, cosmopolitan world state would dethrone the bounded territorial sovereign state as the primary site of collective self-​ determination, opening space for a greater pluralism of self-​determining communities above and below the traditional sovereign state, for peoples “who dream of creating their own forms of political association and governing themselves in their own ways.”44

41.  For an account of contemporary global governance as a “nascent global state whose function is to realize the interests of transnational capital and powerful states in the international system to the disadvantage of third world states and peoples,” see B. S. Chimni, “International Institutions Today:  An Imperial Global State in the Making,” European Journal of International Law 15, 1 (2004): 1–​37 at 1–​2. For another view that also sees a rudimentary world government as a contemporary reality, see Robert E. Goodin, “World Government Is Here!” in Sigal R. Ben-​Porath and Rogers M. Smith, eds., Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 149–​65. 42.  See Catherine Lu, “Decolonizing Borders, Self-​ Determination, and Global Justice,” in Duncan Bell, ed., Empire, Race, and Global Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 43. For further elaborations of indigenous struggles against the structural injustice and alienation of contemporary structures of global governance, see Catherine Lu, Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2017). On “structural indignity,” see N. Bruce Duthu, Shadow Nations: Tribal Sovereignty and the Limits of Legal Pluralism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12–​14. 44.  James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, vol. 2 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), 140.

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10.4 COSMOPOLITAN JUSTICE AS THE ESSENTIAL SUPPORTING CONDITION FOR COLLECTIVE SELF-​D ETERMINATION AND GLOBAL JUSTICE

Principles of cosmopolitan justice outline the rights and duties we owe to other human beings by virtue of their humanity and status as moral persons. I have asserted that such principles of cosmopolitan justice specify minimally just background conditions of global order, in the sense that no global order can be morally legitimate if it fails to respect, protect, or realize cosmopolitan rights and duties in its rules, institutions, practices, structures, and patterned outcomes.45 Democratic statists, however, posit that we should conceptualize just global background conditions in terms of a “statist” justice that refers to claims of justice between well-​ordered peoples or internally legitimate states (that respect their citizens’ fundamental rights). This response raises the question of how such theorists understand the motivational basis for realizing cosmopolitan justice in a statist global order. Exactly how are peoples or states motivated to realize cosmopolitan justice for all? Liberal democratic theorists have asserted that internally well-​ordered institutions not only shape the civic virtues of citizens, cultivating their senses of justice and entitlement in accordance with a political (moral) conception of right and justice or the common good, but they also cultivate the kinds of external political virtues required to establish, support, and implement basic cosmopolitan justice. Thus, Rawls argues that the internal virtues of well-​ ordered peoples also extend externally, so that well-​ordered peoples are able to cooperate on fair terms with other peoples (as opposed to dominating or instrumentalizing them).46 In an intersocietal context, Rawls emphasizes the impact of domestic institutions on the development of members’ motivations, virtues, and conduct in their external relations: “What makes peace among liberal democratic peoples possible is the internal nature of peoples as constitutional democracies and the resulting change of the motives of the citizens.”47 Well-​ordered peoples have a proper sense of self-​love or self-​respect, and “this reasonable sense of proper respect is not unrealistic, but is itself the outcome of democratic domestic institutions.”48

45.  See also Miriam Ronzoni, “The Global Order:  A Case of Background Injustice? A Practice-​Dependent Account,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 37, 3 (2009): 229–​56. 46. See also Richard Beardsworth, Chapter 3, this volume. 47. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 29, 27fn (emphasis added). 48. Ibid., 35. In Rawls’s account, peoples have moral and political agency; they have a fundamental interest in recognition, and they are capable of mutual recognition and respect, which form the foundation of justice and solidarity among peoples. A society of well-​ordered peoples would be characterized by mutual recognition, equity, and power-​sharing. [ 246 ] Catherine Lu

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A condition of the proper functioning of democratic institutions in cultivating the appropriate political virtues at the domestic level is their maintenance of what Rawls calls “essential supporting conditions” for democratic constitutionalism. The fairness of decisions or agreements made through democratic procedures and institutions depends in part on background conditions that ensure conditions of moral reciprocity (which ensure that people are not vulnerable to being taken advantage of or being forced to give in to claims which they do not accept as legitimate).49 At the domestic level, according to Rawls, these essential supporting conditions for democratic justice include fair equality of opportunity, a decent distribution of income and wealth to ensure sufficiency, access to meaningful work and basic health care, as well as free and fair elections, and freedom of the press and to information on matters of public policy.50 With respect to the external virtues of democratic peoples, Rawls even claims that democracies will approximate the ideal of “democratic peace” only to the extent that they realize these essential supporting conditions in their internal social and political arrangements.51 The cultivation of both internal and external political virtues thus depends on formal, well-​ordered institutions continually maintaining certain necessary background structural conditions that ensure morally reciprocal agency. I posit that the cultivation of external cosmopolitan political virtues among democratic states or citizens also requires certain necessary background conditions to obtain at the global level. These global essential supporting conditions constitute the stuff of cosmopolitan justice, and they function to guarantee a basic form of moral reciprocity, which ensures that people are not vulnerable to violations of their basic human rights or to being forced to accept terms of association that threaten their fundamental interests as human beings. It should be understood that one aspect of achieving conditions for basic morally reciprocal agency is a condition of reciprocal or joint structural vulnerability. Rawls acknowledges the role of mutual vulnerability in motivating the extension of democratic virtues, especially toward burdened societies. He first acknowledges that there may be limits to the extension of democratic virtues outward: for example, the lack of affinity between well-​ordered peoples and burdened societies requires that statespersons combat “shortsighted tendencies.”52 He then posits that fearful or enlightened self-​interest may be 49.  John Rawls, Collected Papers, Samuel Freeman, ed. (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1998), 208. 50. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 48–​52. 51. Rawls notes that the standard of reasonable justness underlying his idea of an effective democratic peace goes far beyond most definitions of democracy used in empirical investigations of the “democratic peace” thesis. See Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 53, fn. 68. 52. Ibid., 112.

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the initial basis for motivating peoples to cooperate and carry out the duty of assistance. According to Rawls, then, the global structure of interdependence and attendant mutual vulnerability forms a circumstance of justice that motivates internally well-​ordered peoples not only to care about domestic justice within their own societies, but also to seek to help other peoples to gain their moral and political agency, and together establish a just world order in the form of a well-​ordered society of peoples. Without the proper distribution of structural vulnerabilities among agents, even deliberative democratic virtue may be undermined. Aristotle articulated this sober view of the importance of creating reciprocal vulnerability in order to facilitate deliberative virtue about the common good among well-​ordered or virtuous agents. In his account of the ideal city of virtuous beings (in Books 7 and 8 of Politics), in addition to laying out the appropriate moral education for citizens (growing up under reasonably just or decent institutions, for Rawls) and the condition of sufficiency (met by Rawls’s duty of assistance), Aristotle discusses the kind of property arrangements or distributions that are necessary for democratic deliberation among virtuous citizens to produce decisions that aim toward the common good. He argues that private individual citizens should each have two allotments of territory: one on the frontiers of the city, and one toward the city. According to Aristotle, when citizens deliberate on defense and what to do about external attacks, even the judgments of virtuous beings can be distorted by their particular and asymmetric vulnerabilities to such attacks. For example, those who only own property in the outskirts of the city tend to overreact to raids, while those who only own property within the city tend to dismiss attacks on the outskirts and sometimes respond too late, to the detriment of the city’s defense. Aristotle’s scheme of property distribution in his ideal city thus ensures that every citizen has something (but not everything) to lose in a war or attack on the outskirts, and he considers this a necessary structural condition to motivate even virtuous citizens to deliberate properly about the common defense of the city.53 Even in the ideal city of virtuous citizens, institutional arrangements that sustain background conditions of morally reciprocal agency, including the condition of joint or reciprocal vulnerability (not just empowerment), are necessary to practical wisdom. It seems, then, that even if one does not subscribe to an “interest group pluralist account” of democratic politics,54 but to a deliberative public justification approach, which views citizens as participating in deliberative democratic processes with a view to the common good or justice, it is still 53.  Aristotle, Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1984), VII.10. 54.  Robert Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1959). [ 248 ] Catherine Lu

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the case that people’s capacity to make fair, impartial, and nondominating decisions will suffer from cognitive distortions and epistemic bias when background structural conditions fail to support moral reciprocity. Robert Goodin’s discussion of vulnerability and social justice is especially pertinent here: “No one should be forced into a vulnerable or dependent position, insofar as this can be avoided. If people are placed in such a position (either through personal choice or natural or social necessity), vulnerabilities/​ dependencies should be reciprocal and, ideally, symmetrical among all those who are involved. In no case should they be so severe and asymmetrical that one party has exclusive, discretionary control over resources that the other needs to protect his vital interests.”55 In order to protect the vulnerable, a condition of reciprocal or joint structural vulnerability needs to be produced, and in current circumstances of globalization, it is only a world state that can do this at the global level. Consider the case of the effects of climate change. There are regions that will likely be affected much more negatively than others; and those who contribute the most to producing the problem of climate change may not be the ones who will suffer the most negative consequences. Although the effects of climate change are global, the distribution of its negative effects on humans is characterized by asymmetric rather than symmetric vulnerability (although we may all be highly vulnerable to systemic natural catastrophes in the long run). Under current global conditions, which are defective from a cosmopolitan point of view, the prospect of asymmetric vulnerability to the effects of climate change on interstate, consent-​based processes of collective decision-​ making about environmental and climate justice issues has made a global democratic virtuous circle elusive.56 Only a world state can produce the essential supporting conditions for basic moral reciprocity at the global level, including a condition of global reciprocal or joint vulnerability, which is required to make any deliberation about cosmopolitan and global justice on issues of common global concern (from human rights to migration to the global economy to climate change) fair, legitimate, and effective at the global level. So far, I have argued that the realization of cosmopolitan justice requires a world state. Does such a world state have to take the form of a global democracy?57 My view of the justification of the world state based on cosmopolitan justice can be distinguished from the arguments of those democratic theorists who have embraced institutional cosmopolitanism in the form of 55.  Robert E. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable:  A Re-​ analysis of Our Social Responsibilities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 206. 56. Stephen M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 57. With much variation, “global democracy” refers to the “creation of transnational or supranational sites of democratic deliberation and decision-​making”; see Valentini, “No Global Demos, No Global Democracy?” at 789.

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cosmopolitan democracy, because it leaves open the question of whether the global political structures that form the world state must be modeled along cosmopolitan democratic lines, enabling all individuals to participate in collective decision-​making at the global level. To explain this agnosticism about global democracy as a requirement of institutional cosmopolitanism, I  distinguish between cosmopolitan and global justice. While the content of principles of cosmopolitan justice may be context-​sensitive (e.g., the freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention presupposes the development of the modern state), cosmopolitan rights and duties are noncomparative and nonrelational, and they are claimable by all human beings, irrespective of nationality or political membership in society. Thus, for example, it is not only citizens or conationals who are entitled to freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention by their particular state, but also noncitizens who encounter the agents of any particular state. Global justice includes cosmopolitan justice as a fundamental component but can also develop beyond it, and, depending on historical conditions, will include additional principles of justice to regulate the terms of global cooperation and order. These principles of global justice are thus comparative and relational, whereas “cosmopolitan justice” refers to the enforceable nonrelational or noncomparative rights and duties that we owe to each other as moral persons entitled to rights that we possess by virtue of our common humanity.58 It is conceivable that a full conception of global justice, beyond cosmopolitan justice, will necessitate global democracy, or global political structures that are democratically organized or that maximize opportunities for individuals and various groups to exercise participatory democratic agency. One worry about such a position is that it mistakenly universalizes a politically parochial (or at least contextually sensitive) value of democratic agency.59 My understanding of institutional cosmopolitanism focuses on the effective and systematic realization of fundamental human interests, and values participatory democratic decision-​making to the extent that it can serve that end. In this sense, I agree with Daniel Weinstock that global democracy should be evaluated in terms of its instrumental role in protecting and promoting “the fundamental interests of all the world’s citizens, rather than by that of maximizing citizens’ democratic agency” at the global level.60 Under current global conditions, we cannot really know what a globally just world order entails because absent cosmopolitan justice, any terms of global political and distributive justice that are negotiated by contemporary

58. See Risse, On Global Justice, 52–​53. 59. For this reason, Rawls’s account of human rights in The Law of Peoples does not include a right to democracy. 60.  Daniel Weinstock, “The Real World of (Global) Democracy,” Journal of Social Philosophy 37, no. 1 (2006): 6–​20, at 10. [ 250 ] Catherine Lu

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agents, even those based on voluntary consent or agreement, cannot be validated as outcomes that reflect basic moral reciprocity. Only with the realization of cosmopolitan justice, which requires world state formation, can we arrive at a global political condition in which the outcomes of global debates about collective self-​determination and global political and distributive justice can be considered legitimate and morally binding. The establishment of a global political authority is required, first, to realize cosmopolitan justice, and second, to determine and enforce any other additional principles of global justice that may be appropriate due to the evolution of historical conditions of human social and political relations at the global level. One implication of this view is that cosmopolitan justice neither necessarily rejects all versions of the “priority to compatriots” thesis, nor necessarily endorses distributive egalitarian conceptions of global justice. A  cosmopolitan can be agnostic between sufficientarian and egalitarian accounts of global distributive justice, for example, and may even endorse the view that we can favor our compatriots on some distributional matters. At the same time, a cosmopolitan cannot accept a normative principle of compatriot favoritism with respect to fulfilling duties of cosmopolitan justice, which we owe to other human beings as moral persons, regardless of their nationality or citizenship.61 One can imagine principles of global justice that could make certain forms of partiality (toward compatriots or other associative groups) morally permissible in some areas, but principles of cosmopolitan justice cannot admit partiality as a ground for differential fulfillment.

10.5 CONCLUSION

If it is true that only a world state can provide the appropriate institutional context in which to realize cosmopolitan justice, or the essential supporting conditions for externally legitimate claims to collective self-​determination, as well as any more elaborate account of global justice, does this mean that our contemporary domestic democracies are doomed as agents of justice? In positing the world state as the correct institutional implication of cosmopolitan justice in current global conditions, we face the problem of transition. Even if a world state is the desirable end point of political struggle, we want to avoid a Soviet-​style experience of systemic collapse, which rarely constructs without first destroying a great deal. The counsel of communitarian, nationalist, liberal, and republican democratic theorists is to build a well-​ordered society of peoples or an international order of effective, representative states, buttressed by various supranational

61. See Ypi, “Cosmopolitanism Without If and Without But.”

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institutions. Habermas noted a provisional or transitional interpretation of Kant’s pacific federation of free republican states:  “This weak conception of a voluntary association of states that are willing to coexist peacefully while nevertheless retaining their sovereignty seemed to recommend itself as a transitional stage en route to a world republic.”62 Peoples and states that are well ordered, effective, and representative provide the essential supporting conditions for their citizens to engage in effective political struggle; such citizens and states may be the most promising agents for bringing about progressive institutional and political developments at the global level.63 At the same time, I have argued that progressive cosmopolitan development would require such peoples and states to institute more complex self-​determination orders than those afforded by statist or national models, entailing greater limits on the authority of states and nations to restrict transborder social relations of indigenous and other geographically transboundary social groups. Ultimately, progressive cosmopolitanism must culminate in the establishment of a world state, or a global political authority that effectively and legitimately enforces the cosmopolitan rights and duties that all democratic theorists, as well as states, already recognize to some degree. Only with the realization of institutional cosmopolitanism in the form of a cosmopolitan world state can the principles and values of collective self-​determination and social justice championed by democratic theorists be based on a morally acceptable foundation. Democrats committed to the principle of collective self-​determination cannot escape the conclusion that acknowledging moral cosmopolitanism requires significant revision of statist and nationalist projects of self-​determination in ways that ultimately support transcending an international order based on the political and territorial sovereignty of states and moving toward a cosmopolitan world state.

62.  Jürgen Habermas, “A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society?” in Garrett W. Brown and David Held, eds., The Cosmopolitanism Reader (Cambridge, UK:  Polity Press, 2010), 267–​88, at 268. See also Jürgen Habermas, “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace:  At Two Hundred Years’ Historical Remove,” in Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, eds., The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 165–​201. 63. See also Lea Ypi, Global Justice and Avant-​Garde Political Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 147–​53. [ 252 ] Catherine Lu

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CHAPTER 11

All Together Now Geography, the Three Cosmopolitanisms, and Planetary Earth DANIEL H. DEUDNEY

11.1 THE THREE WAVES OF COSMOPOLITANISM  

Among the many lines of ethical and political thought originating in Greco-​ Roman antiquity and developing in the modern European Enlightenment period, cosmopolitanism is not only very much still with us, but also seemingly more relevant than ever before. As the human situation has become increasingly “global,” and indeed something of a “global village,” cosmopolitanism seems increasingly salient, an approach whose time has finally come. Reflecting this apparent relevance and timeliness, self-​described cosmopolitan theorists are deeply engaged in exploring the ethical and political implications of a host of relatively novel and practically important contemporary global issues, such as the worldwide flow of people, goods, and ideas, violence of all types and on all scales, and the sources and solutions of extreme poverty everywhere.1    This paper has benefited from comments from Richard Beardsworth, Luis Cabrera, Reider Maliks, and the anonymous reviewer for Oxford University Press. 1. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008); Alison M. Jaggar., ed., Thomas Pogge and His Critics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010); Cecile Fabre, Cosmopolitanism and War (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012); Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. ch. 11; Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, eds., The Cosmopolitan Reader (Cambridge, UK:  Polity Press, 2010); and Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown, “Cosmopolitanism,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Ed.).

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“Eco-​cosmopolitans” seek global solutions to environmental degradation and planetary climate change.2 And contemporary cosmopolitans conceptualize and advocate changes, sometimes radical in scope, for global political, economic, and social institutions. In short, cosmopolitanism, the most precociously universal of preglobal Western ethical and political orientations, seems poised for a major new golden age of relevance as the human world becomes globalized in so many important ways. This recent re-nascence of cosmopolitanism has also been marked by a great diversity in the types of claims advanced as “cosmopolitan,” evidenced in the rise of what some refer to as “hyphenated cosmopolitanism.”3 Contemporary cosmopolitanism is sufficiently extensive and distinctive to be referred to as “third cosmopolitanism,” to distinguish it from the first cosmopolitanism of the Stoics and the second cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and Kant. There is, however, a very puzzling feature of contemporary cosmopolitanism: the political forms that cosmopolitans now advance as appropriate or necessary for the realization of moral obligations are radically different than those promoted by earlier cosmopolitans. The three waves of cosmopolitanism differ profoundly with regard to the scope of political agency, the domestic form of suitable government, and the need for world government. Ancient Stoic cosmopolitanism was largely apolitical, focused on the achievement of an inner freedom that was quite indifferent to actual political circumstances. Marcus Aurelius, emperor of the Roman world, and Epictetus, a former Roman slave, both advanced Stoic moral thought, and neither seemed to think that these views had much, or any, practical bearing on politics. In the second wave of cosmopolitanism, Kant had a strongly quietistic posture toward the appropriateness and impact of morally guided action. But today, a wide array of self-​described cosmopolitan thinkers promote radical changes in the organization of states and the international system that they deem are necessary to realize cosmopolitan moral obligations and agendas, as evidenced in several of the other chapters in this volume.4

2. Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999). 3.  Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism:  Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006); Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhagha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds., Cosmopolitanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics:  Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998); and Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism:  Theory, Context, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 4. See especially the chapters by Lu, Koenig-​Archibugi, and Cabrera. For an extended dialogue between cosmopolitans and others, see Gillian Brock, ed., Cosmopolitanism Versus Non-​cosmopolitanism:  Critiques, Defences, Reconceptualizations (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013). For contemporary cosmopolitanism in relation to other theories and schools, see Richard Beardsworth, Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011). [ 254 ]  Daniel H. Deudney

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The politics of cosmopolitanism also has come a very long way, amounting to an almost complete reversal of the political forms it advances. The politics of ancient cosmopolitanism, to the extent it had a politics, was highly elitist in character and was associated with the rule of the few or the one. It had a very top (but not very far) down view of political change through enlightenment. Kant postulated the desirability of a very limited form of republican constitutionalism inside nation-​states. But over the twentieth century, third-​ wave cosmopolitanism has come to embrace a broadly liberal and democratic set of ideas centered around the universalization of a wide set of procedural and substantial rights universally applicable to all individuals, regardless of gender, “race,” or socioeconomic status. Contemporary cosmopolitans have completely shed their earlier elitist, apolitical, and “idealistic” (in the sense of utopian) affinities and tendencies, and embraced agendas that are radically democratic, strongly political, and plausibly realizable. Cosmopolitan views on world government have undergone an equally stunning transformation. Zeno and the ancient Stoic cosmopolitans did not entertain the possibility of an actual world government, a government coextensive with the entirety of humanity. Kant, the quintessential cosmopolitan of the modern European Enlightenment, saw world government as possible, but he viewed it as being beyond, or even antithetical to, cosmopolitan duties. Yet today, self-​described cosmopolitans such as Luis Cabrera and Raffaele Marchetti and others see some form of substantial world government as appropriate—​even necessary—​to realize cosmopolitan obligations.5 This chapter explores these dramatic changes in the political content of cosmopolitan thought. The magnitude of these changes could be seen as calling into question the coherence of cosmopolitanism, suggesting that one label is being used inappropriately to describe several quite different positions. 5.  Among cosmopolitan theorists who explicitly call for a world government are Luis Cabrera, Political Theory of Global Justice:  A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State (London:  Routledge, 2004); Luis Cabrera, The Practice of Global Citizenship (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Raffaele Marchetti, Global Democracy, For and Against:  Ethical Theory, Institutional Design, and Social Struggles (London:  Routledge, 2008). Thomas Pogge, who has long rejected the advocacy of a world state exercising some absolute supremacy, has more recently characterized his scheme of cosmopolitan global integration, which permits greater separation of powers and dispersal of authority, as world government; see Thomas Pogge, “Kant’s Vision of a Just World Order,” in Thomas Hill, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Kant’s Ethics (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2009), at 205. For a similar cosmopolitan scheme of global institutions, see Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders:  A Global Political Theory (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 5; see also David Held, Cosmopolitanism:  Ideals and Realities (Cambridge, UK:  Polity Press, 2010); and Daniele Archibugi and David Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy:  An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995). For an overview of the range of contemporary thinking about world government, see Luis Cabrera, “Review Article:  World Government:  Renewed Debate, Persistent Challenges,” European Journal of International Relations 16, no. 3 (2010): 511–​30.

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The political institutions that contemporary cosmopolitans advance are so different from those by earlier cosmopolitan thinkers as to call into question whether there is actually any distinctive political form associated with cosmopolitan moral obligations. But at a minimum, the magnitude of these changes requires some explanation or account of the logic of this evolution. In this chapter, I argue that the great changes in political content across the three cosmopolitanisms become intelligible when the often-​overlooked geography of cosmopolitanisms is brought into consideration. In the most general terms, the shifting political content of the three cosmopolitanisms tracks the evolution in the geography of the human world across three historical epochs. First is Archipelago Earth, marked by almost nonexistent interaction and interdependence at global distances, creating a political geography of multiple islandlike political “worlds.” Second, beginning five centuries ago, is Global Earth, marked by interactions and interdependence at global distances, at first thin, but then with increasing intensity, as well as a recognition of the Earth’s globality and finitude. And third is the contemporary Planetary Earth, marked by very high levels of interaction and interdependence. In each of these three Earths, the political content of cosmopolitanism has changed, enabled by new possibilities and responsive to new problems. A second geographic aspect of cosmopolitanism that sheds light on the evolution and nature of cosmopolitanism across time is the distinction made by geographers between space and place. Ancient cosmopolitans had a space-​centered geography that was in sharp opposition to the place-​centered geographies of nonuniversal “politan” political associations, giving rise to the “two-​city” model for understanding political obligation and association. In this model, every person was born into some politan, place-​based political association, with thick substantive obligations and affiliations based on interest and affect, as well as another, universal, space-​based polis of rational beings, the “cosmopolis.” Thus arise central, recurrent, and never fully resolved questions: What is the relationship between the obligations generated by the two different cities—​between those of the natal, politan, place-​based city and the cosmopolis? Are natal politan associations to be left unchanged, reformed, or revolutionized by the obligations of cosmopolis? And from where might the architectures for reconstituting politan political associations be found? These questions become particularly acute in the contemporary Planetary Earth, and it is in forging new answers to these questions in a human world marked by intense interactions and interdependence that contemporary, third-​ wave cosmopolitan thinkers have found their vocation and begun forging a new cosmopolitanism radically unlike its predecessors. The project of third cosmopolitanism is particularly challenging because successive waves of the globalization of machine-​based civilization have turned the entire planet into a place, rendering obsolete space-​based cosmopolitanism, as well as the two-​cities model. Human interdependence and interaction across global space [ 256 ]  Daniel H. Deudney

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are now as intense as they were previously only in very confined locations. As this has happened, third-​wave cosmopolitans, pursuing a path opened tentatively by Kant, have embraced and sought to universalize a scaled-​up version of political architectures drawn from one historical type of politan political association—​liberal democratic federal constitutionalism. Another way to frame the question of political order for Planetary Earth, and the role of cosmopolitanism in it, is to think of this enterprise as the “terrapolitan project,” the project of building a polity suited to the monstrously novel circumstances of the Earth as a place. The term “terrapolitan”6 captures the fact that the newly emergent planetary field for moral and political action is now a very particular place—​the entire planet Earth as reconfigured by machine civilization—​with neighborhoodlike and villagelike proximities. This situation is marked by catastrophic and even existential threats stemming from material developments such as nuclear war, climate change, and biotech pandemics, thus creating powerful universal interests that almost certainly require the erection of some version of substantial world government. Furthermore, much of the political action emerging to combat these universal threats is based on various forms of Earth-​affirming spiritualties and Earth-​place identities. The terrapolitan project of conceptualizing a worldwide political order suitable to Planetary Earth has been gathering force over at least a century, now occupies the center of political and international theorizing, and has drawn diverse thinkers from across the natural science and humanities into its orbit. What does cosmopolitanism have to contribute to the terrapolitan project? The political forms being advanced by third-​wave cosmopolitans are broadly republican in character, the logics of place-​based and affective associations are largely alien to cosmopolitanism, and the material developments of machine civilization interacting with the natural features of the planet appear quite external to cosmopolitan lines of thought. The question thus arises of whether there is anything that is both unique and relevant in cosmopolitanism for the terrapolitan project. Why not simply retire cosmopolitanism and proceed with the conceptual resources of other approaches, new and old, that are more obviously equipped to grapple with the problems of the terrapolitan project? The answer to this question is fourfold. First, beginning with Kant, geography and the fact of the planet’s globality have played a more important role in cosmopolitanism than is often recognized. Second, the universalistic human valuation at the heart of cosmopolitanism, while logically redundant with the notion of democratic citizenship and membership in a world polity, 6.  For earlier deployment and discussion, see Daniel Deudney, “Earth Orders:  Intergenerational Public Sovereignty, Republican Earth Constitutions, and Planetary Identities,” in Karen Litfin, ed., The Greening of Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 299–​325.

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serves as a valuable counterweight against the tendency of formal democracy to slide into various forms of oligarchy and stratification. Third, the humanism of cosmopolitanism serves as a valuable guideline for combating the emerging seductions of strong forms of transhumanism and posthumanism. Fourth, the ancient Stoic emphasis on the cultivation of bodily self-​discipline finds new relevance as a contributor to the development of the virtues of self-​ restraint vital for planetary sustainability. The argument proceeds in four steps. The next section of this chapter reflects on the relations between cosmopolitanism, geography, and space and place. Then, two additional sections examine the politics and geographies of the “first cosmopolitanism” of the ancient Stoics, and then of the modern Enlightenment “second cosmopolitanism” of Kant. The final section outlines reasons for viewing the Earth as a whole as a place and discusses how some elements of cosmopolitan theory and practice contribute to the terrapolitan project.

11.2 SPACE AND PLACE GEOGRAPHIES: COSMOPOLITAN, POLITAN, AND TERRAPOLITAN

The relationship between cosmopolitanism and geography is filled with tensions and contradictions. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism has significantly defined itself as the opposite of approaches to ethics and politics that are “geo-​grounded.” But on the other hand, cosmopolitanism, in linking its politics to the “cosmos,” is based on, or informed by, a “geography” in the broadest sense of the term. Thus, cosmopolitanism has a “geography” that is purged of “geo-​groundings,” influences, and associations, but it is nevertheless inherently attached to what might be characterized as a “cosmic anti-​ geographic geography.” In short, geography is both profoundly oppositional to cosmopolitanism and deeply constituent of it. Geographic thinkers and philosophers characterize space and place as radically different.7 A geography of space is based on an abstraction from, or negation of, geographies of place. Space is homogenous and infinitely extensive, and it can be represented in the mathematically abstract forms of geometry and Cartesian grids. Units of space are comparable and interchangeable. Space can be infinitely and precisely divided into parts, but there is no “outside” of

7. A classic statement is found in Yi-​Fu Tuan, Space and Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). Edward Casey traces the displacement of Western thinking to the transcendental turn in Greek philosophy and looks for remedies in phenomenology in The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). [ 258 ]  Daniel H. Deudney

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space. Everything that is anywhere is in space. Things change their position in space, but space remains eternally unchanged. As geographers and others have pointed out, the geography of cosmopolitanism centers on space.8 Cosmopolitanism, asserting that individuals everywhere have equal innate moral worth, hypothesizes that all humans are members of a spatially constituted political community, a “polis” of the “cosmos” which in principle knows no limits or boundaries and excludes no one. The scope of cosmopolis is universal, in principle coterminous with the universe or cosmos and encompassing all reason-​bearing beings, whether human or divine. A “world without borders” is a cosmopolitan world; a world with borders is not cosmopolitan. In contrast, a place has a distinct character and distinct limits or boundaries. A  place has a geomorphic shape, and thus cannot be fully represented, or mapped, with straight lines and grids. A  place always has an inside and an outside, and political associations based in places always have “insiders” and “outsiders.” Places and the political associations located in places change; they emerge, grow, die, and disappear. No place is forever, and forever has no place. Polities based in specific places are immensely varied in their character, but all can be thought of as “politan.” Polities based on specific places are always politan, but never cosmopolitan. No two places are ever fully alike. Politan political associations located in specific places may have features in common with polities in other places, but they also have inescapable differences that stem from their different places.9 Places are geomorphically varied in their topography, climate, and ecology. Places are different because they have different physical geographies and biogeographies. Places also differ from one another not just “by nature,” but also “by artifice,” in their human-​built infrastructures. The characters of politan political associations based in places are never fully environmentally determined, but they are never fully free of environmental influences. Political action within politan political associations is largely based on a combination of interests arising from particular circumstances, and of passions, channeled and educated by particularistic institutions of cultural education. Cosmopolitanism, in all its varieties, has been in essential opposition to politan political associations based on place. This opposition takes many

8.  Most recent cosmopolitan thinking has been produced by moral philosophers, who pay little attention to geography. But cosmopolitanism has been of considerable interest to geographers. See, in particular, David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Harvey, a leading Marxian “radical” geographer, traces a procapitalist, cosmopolitan line of thinking from Kant’s privileging of the passage of merchants to the hierarchical elite “cosmopolitanism” of “Davos-​man” and contemporary predatory “economic globalization.” 9.  For attributes of place, see John Agnew, Place and Politics:  The Geographical Mediation of State and Society (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 26–​28.

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forms. The ethics and politics of cosmopolitanism have been essentially oriented toward diminishing, tempering, and (ideally) eliminating the claims and associations of particular—​and thus inherently particularistic—​political associations which are mired in, and deeply shaped by, the particular material geographies of particular places. Cosmopolitanism seeks to base ethics and politics on a universal community constituted by abstract universals and abstractions from the particularities of things and places (and even bodies). All cosmopolitanisms are fundamentally at odds with the thick claims and associations of politan polities, be they tribes and tribal confederations, city-​states, nation-​states, and even the putative “universal” empires actually erected in some parts of the world. Cosmopolitans emphasize what the dissimilar have in common. In antiquity, this took the form of asserting the existence of ius gentium, a set of laws common to, and binding upon, all political communities, whatever their other manifold and manifest differences. Cosmopolitans assert forms of community and connection that are “above” particular politan political communities. This has often made cosmopolitanism attractive to the rulers and aspiring rulers of empires built by the conquest of different, previously independent, polities. Thus, cosmopolitan ideas were of particular appeal to the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire, as means to elevate and thus legitimate the rule of one people over another, and to help sustain order in their polyglot populaces. And the legitimating universalism of cosmopolitanism has also been the handmaiden of modern European empires and imperialism.10 Cosmopolitanism has also sought to legitimate forms of interaction between politan political associations. Modern cosmopolitanism has sought to privilege the rights of commerce and various rights for outsiders, such as political asylum. And across the last two centuries, ideals and claims cast as cosmopolitan have commonly accompanied efforts to build and strengthen international law, organizations and regimes that exist “above” and “between” modern politan nation-​states. In the modern era, cosmopolitanism has defined itself mainly against the “national” form of politan political association. Nationalist ideology and consciousness are particularly potent because they link themselves so fully with attachments to, and love of, place, a sentiment which the geographer Yi-​Tu Tuan refers to as “topophilia.”11 Major philosophical statements of nationalist thinking by Rousseau, Burke, and von Herder assert that national associations are superior to international or cosmopolitan ones because they are significantly connected to specific 10.  Anthony Pagden, “Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Legacies of European Imperialism,” Constellations 7, no. 1 (2000): 3–​22. 11. Yi-​Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). [ 260 ]  Daniel H. Deudney

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places. Burke speaks of the roots of patriotism in terms of affection for the “natal soil.”12 National politan discursive claims of affiliation are also typically biological in character. Herder calls the nation “as natural a plant as a family, only with more branches.”13 Indeed the word “nation,” deriving from the Latin word “natio,” meaning “to be born,” posits that national affiliations are based on prepolitical, natural, and primordial foundations. The nation is also commonly cast as the “motherland” or “fatherland.” Similarly, national political associations gain strength by evoking and memorializing the experiences and collective memories of wars, and the heroism and blood sacrifices they entail. In short, national politan associations have a thickness and emotive power that makes them formidable and enduring. In contrast, modern cosmopolitanism seems much weaker generating and sustaining effective affective affinities. Contemporary nationalist critics of cosmopolitanism continue to emphasize its comparative “placelessness,” affective neutrality, and “rootlessness.”14 Being “placeless” and “rootless,” cosmopolitanism lacks the ability to evoke the shared experiences of a shared place. Emphasizing rationality, cosmopolitanism cannot readily generate emotional attachments. Being pacific, it has no blood sacrifices to sustain emotional attachments. Having no “outside” and no “other,” it has difficulty sustaining a “self.” In short, claims for cosmopolitan association lack the powerful groundings that place-​based polities possess. The contemporary human situation is, however, radically different from its historical predecessors. It is marked by levels of interaction and interdependence on a global and planetary scale—​levels that were previously experienced only on much smaller scales. Due to the transformations wrought by the globalization of machine-​based civilization interacting with the physical features of the Earth, a “global village” has been created. The practical context for all human activities has become a densely occupied and tightly coupled “neighborhood.” In short, in terms of practical human geography, the Earth as a whole is now a place. As such, it is radically unlike the geographies underpinning previous cosmopolitanisms. And in important ways, this new “placeness” of the human global situation is like that of previous politan polities. As such, the claims of political association and action evoked by this global/​planetary material situation are appropriately designated as terrapolitan. The space geography underpinning cosmopolitanism can thus be seen as transitional between 12. Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Boston: Little Brown, 1901), vol. 11, 422–​23. 13.  F. Bernard, ed., Herder on Social and Political Culture (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1969). 14.  Anthony D. Smith, “Towards a Global Culture?” in Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture:  Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity (Beverly Hills, CA:  SAGE, 1990): 171–​91.

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OUTER SPACE

Terrestrial Earth

TERRAPOLITAN (PLACE)

COSMOPOLITAN (SPACE) SIZE

POLITAN (PLACE)

TIME

Figure 11.1. The politan, the cosmopolitan, and the terrapolitan.

the politan associations based on different Earth places, and the emergent terrapolitan association based on the Earth as a whole as a place (see Figure 11.1). The terrapolitan thus combines the universality of the historical cosmopolitan with the “placeness” of the historical politan, but its essential “geo-​ groundedness” makes it more a politan than a cosmopolitan formation. Before specifying further features of the emergent features of Planetary Earth and their relationship to contemporary third cosmopolitanism, it is valuable to briefly survey the geographies of the first cosmopolitanism of the ancient Stoics and the second cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and Kant to establish the profound ways in which their political agendas were shaped by their geographies of space and place.

11.3 FIRST COSMOPOLITANISM: ANCIENT STOIC POLITICS AND GEOGRAPHY

Cosmopolitanism was first conceptualized by theorists of the fourth and last great philosophical school of ancient Athens, the Stoics. Among the ethical and political theories developed in ancient Athens, Stoicism enjoyed the greatest and widest influence in the ancient world. The ideas developed by Greek, and then Roman, Stoic theorists gained wide influence because they [ 262 ]  Daniel H. Deudney

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were adopted as the dominant ideology of the Hellenistic and Roman political elites during the centuries after the military and political eclipse of the polis city-​state. In contrast, the ethical and political philosophies developed by Plato and Aristotle and their rival schools are completely centered on the life of the polis. Both held that any form of political association larger than the polis was not a fully human one, or at least one in which human flourishing was impossible. In sharp contrast to the city-​state parochialism of classical Greek thought, the Stoics differentiated themselves by their explicit, indeed pointed, assertion of the superiority of an ideal “polis” or city of vast scope, one that encompassed the largest possible whole, the cosmos. In asserting the primacy of a community that embraced all rational beings in the cosmos, the Stoics were appealing to an ideal and “unworldly” community that went beyond the largest-​scale geographic formation of the ancient world, the oikoumene, the entire inhabited Earth. As Seneca famously put it, there are two political communities, one of which is “truly great and truly common, embracing gods and men,” which “measures the boundary” its extent “by the sun.” The other community is one to which we have been “assigned by our birth.”15 Thus, the cosmopolitanism of the Stoics appealed to a radically complete geography of space that defined itself as the opposite of politan political associations based on geographies of place. Once the Stoics asserted the primacy of a community of such unlimited and unbounded spatial magnitude, the question of which political forms were consistent with cosmopolitans’ moral principles posed enduring problems that were answered by different Stoic theorists in different ways, thus giving the politics of first cosmopolitanism a significantly indeterminate and fluctuating character. Unfortunately, most of the major early Greek texts of Stoic cosmopolitanism are lost, adding to the difficulty in ascertaining their doctrines.16 But overall, it appears that the center of gravity of Stoic cosmopolitanism was not really political in character, focused instead on the psyche

15. Seneca, De Otio, 4.1. Taking this duality even further beyond the two-​cities model, Socrates posits a “two Earths” model, with a perfect spherical Earth transcendent above the corrupt Earth inhabited by humans. Plato, Phaedo, 110c. 16. For reconstructions and interpretative debates on Stoic politics, see Margaret E. Reesor, The Political Theory of the Old and Middle Stoa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951); H. C. Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963); Mason Hammond, City-​State and World State in Greek and Roman Political Thought Until Augustus (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1951); Anton-​Hermann Chroust, “The Ideal Polity of the Early Stoics: Zeno’s Republic,” Review of Politics 27, no. 2 (1965): 173–​83; Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (London:  Brill, 1985); Francis Edward Devine, “Stoicism on the Best Regime,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31, no. 3 (1970): 323–​ 36; and Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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of the individual rather than political structures. Its philosophizing aimed to provide what Martha Nussbaum nicely refers to as a “medicinal tonic to the soul” or a “therapy of desire.”17 But one feature of Stoic cosmopolitanism, its radical universalism, stood in sharp contrast to the much more parochial orientation of the classic polis political philosophers. The Stoics posited that all humans, regardless of gender or station in life, were all equally members of the human community, and this principle of radical moral egalitarianism continues to define cosmopolitan thinking. But classical Stoic cosmopolitan thinkers gave little attention to either political structures or material contexts and tended toward philosophical and moral idealism. The Stoics tended to view freedom as the mastery of the psyche’s enslaving desires and passions, rather than as the absence of political restraints. Despite their radical egalitarianism and concern for psychic freedom, they attached little importance to individual political freedom and popular rule.18 To the extent the Stoics conceptualized political orders, they emphasized appropriate hierarchy and the enlightenment of aristocratic and monarchic power, rather than their overthrow. As such, Greek cosmopolitan thinking fitted well with the situation and needs of the ruling classes of large states, first in the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Eastern Mediterranean, and then in the Roman Empire. Greek cosmopolitanism was brought to Rome by Paneatius, whose version of Stoicism emphasized the outer virtues of public service and humanitas. This more outward-​looking but aristocratic version of Stoicism was given wide currency through the writings of the Roman politician, orator, and lawyer Marcus Tullius Cicero, who played a prominent role in the aristocratic counterrevolution against popular demands for the extension, or at least preservation, of the democratic elements of the Roman Constitution during the late Republic. Cicero’s political writings, while almost completely derivative, were widely influential not just in Rome, but in later European thought. His version of cosmopolitanism placed great emphasis on rule by elites and on the cultivation of elite virtue. With the end of the Republic and the establishment of the monarchical Principate, Roman Stoicism, developed by figures such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, continued to emphasize inner discipline. To the extent their Stoicism had any politics, it aimed toward enlightening and moderating rather than overthrowing despotism, and for “the cultivation of humanitas” and a “politics 17. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 18.  As Nussbaum points out, the Stoic view that slaves and women were equal in their potential for reason and wisdom was “not combined with any very robust interest in altering the political realities of slaves’ and women’s lives. To respect a slave as a human being is, as Stoic texts make clear, perfectly compatible with perpetuating and endorsing the political institution of slavery.” Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, 504. [ 264 ]  Daniel H. Deudney

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of gradualism and mercy.”19 But the Stoic cosmopolitan emphasis on a type of virtue potentially achievable by anyone, regardless of origin or station, and on the existence of universal moral laws applicable to all peoples regardless of their differing customs and laws, may have both legitimated and moderated the imperial rule of the Romans over their vast and seemingly universal empire.

11.4 SECOND COSMOPOLITANISM: KANT, GEOGRAPHY, AND PERPETUAL PEACE

The European Enlightenment produced the next great wave of cosmopolitan thinking.20 Although a variety of prominent thinkers espoused ideas which they characterized as “cosmopolitan,” the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant stands out as the most influential and important. The core of Kant’s ethics has important similarities with the ideas of the ancient Stoics, in its emphasis on the primacy of virtue and the radical universality of moral community.21 But within Kant’s large, complex, and influential writings centered on epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, his treatments on politics are late, short, and scattered, as well as subject to sharply conflicting interpretations.22 Among these political writings, the influence of the ideas advanced in his short work Perpetual Peace continues to be great in contemporary cosmopolitanism, as well as liberal international relations (IR) theory.23

19. Ibid., 504. 20.  For the prominence and varieties of Enlightenment cosmopolitan thinking, see Thomas Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought:  Its Form and Function in the Ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–​1790 (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1977); and Pauline Kleingeld, “Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth-​Century Germany,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 3 (1999): 505–​24. 21.  For the links between Kant’s thought and Stoicism, see Martha Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism,” in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-​ Bachmann, eds., Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 25–​58. 22.  For the diversity of interpretations and the difficulties in resolving them, see Reider Maliks, Kant’s Politics in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 23. For diverse interpretations by international theorists, see Carl Joachim Friedrich, Inevitable Peace (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1948); F. H. Hinsley, “Kant,” in his Power and the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 62–​80; Kenneth Waltz, “Kant, Liberalism, and War,” American Political Science Review 56, no. 2 (June 1962): 331–​40; W. B. Gallie, “Kant on Perpetual Peace,” in his Philosophers of Peace and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 8–​37; Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 1,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (1983): 205–​35, and “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part  2,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, no. 4 (1983), 323–​53; and David Boucher, “International and Cosmopolitan Societies: Locke, Vattel, and Kant,” Political Theories

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But what such a universal ethical orientation means for political order is not immediately evident, and it is in making the move from his ethics to his politics that claims about geography enter powerfully into Kant’s argument. Kant’s turn to politics is driven by a problem emerging from his ethics: having established in his Critique of Practical Reason that the imperatives of morality are fundamentally grounded in human reason, Kant is driven to ask whether the moral individual might find anything in the actual developments of human history which “permits us to hope” for the realization of political arrangements consistent with the dictates of morality.24 Part of Kant’s answer to this question is to recommend a three-​part program:  “republican constitutions” within nation-​states, limited forms of “hospitality” for individuals across international borders, and a thin interstate “pacific union” of nonaggression pacts. Kant’s political work does not appear at first glance to have much of a geography, but in fact geography plays a surprisingly pivotal role in defining the scope and features of his conceptualization of “cosmopolitan right” and his opposition to world government.25 Although Kant never published a work on geography, he taught a popular course on the subject dozens of times over his long career as a university lecturer.26 Despite the ways in which subsequent cosmopolitans and internationalists have sought to deploy and expand his ideas, Kant viewed politan political associations based on places to be of central importance, and his cosmopolitanism is entirely about limited aspects of their interactions. Like the Stoics, Kant has a two-​cities model—​one given by birth, the other open to reason. Kant’s “cosmopolitan right” is confined to a limited type of hospitality to be extended in some circumstances to refugees

of International Relations, from Thucydides to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 255–​88. 24.  Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in Lewis White B ​ eck, ed., On History:  Immanuel Kant (Indianapolis:  Bobbs-​ Merrill, 1963), 11. As such, Kant’s intricate argument, whatever its merits, is not a theoretical prediction of the future, but rather an elaborate device to hearten the moral man—​a philosophical pep talk—​and is analogous to his claim that God must exist because His existence is necessary to underpin morality. For a discussion of this move, see William A. Galston, Kant and the Problem of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 25.  Multiple aspects of Kant’s geography and its role in his thinking are analyzed in Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta, eds., Reading Kant’s Geography (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011). 26.  Most recent cosmopolitan thinking has been produced by moral philosophers, who pay little attention to geography. But cosmopolitanism has been of considerable interest to geographers. See in particular David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2009). Harvey traces a line of thinking from Kant’s privileging of the passage of merchants to the hierarchical elite “cosmopolitanism” of “Davos-​man” and contemporary predatory “economic globalization.” [ 266 ]  Daniel H. Deudney

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and merchants, and provides no support for the establishment of a world government. According to Kant, humanity is organized into diverse communities based on place. Civil societies are constituted by people of “common descent.” Peoples have spread over the diverse parts of the world, and they have acquired different national traits due to the different environments in which they live. As “animals and men,” they are “gradually changed by their environment.”27 War, which the Stoics sought to moderate, serves for Kant as the motor for the improvement of humanity, as technological progress makes war progressively more violent. Throughout Kant’s writings on politics, the fact that the Earth is spherical, and thus finite, plays a key role in his thinking about the relationship between political order and cosmopolitan moral obligations. Because the Earth is finite, groups of humans are forced to accommodate themselves to each other, and it is from this interaction that the content of cosmopolitan duties arises. As he puts it in a much-​quoted passage in Perpetual Peace, “[A]‌community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world.”28 As a result, “the idea of a cosmopolitan law” cannot be viewed as “fantastic and overstrained,” but is instead “a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international law” and is transformed into a “universal law of humanity.”29 In sum, as Jens Bartelson nicely puts it, for Kant, “world community is based on the common awareness of inhabiting the same planet.”30 In short, the practical geography of thin human interactions on a global scope provides the basis for the substantive content of universal moral obligation and law. But the specific obligations and arrangements that follow from this fact of interdependence are remarkably limited for Kant. First, his “cosmopolitan right” amounts to a very circumscribed “right of hospitality,” in which outsiders are to be afforded temporary haven, but only if they are faced with destruction, and only if they are deemed to pose no threat.31 Kant also clearly says that a league of independent, “republican” nation-​ states is superior to a world government, which would be “one universal monarchy” and tend to become a “soulless despotism” because “laws always lose and vigor what government gains in extent.”32 This standard Enlightenment 27. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Lewis White Beck, ed., On History: Immanuel Kant (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 107 28. Ibid., 105. 29. Ibid., 101. 30.  Jens Bartelson, Visions of World Community (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009), 176. 31. For a discussion of the narrow character of Kant’s “rights of hospitality,” see Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2004), 27. 32. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 113.

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view depends upon historically particular assumptions about distance. The buried, but pivotal and material contextual factor of violence interdependence pops briefly into view when Kant observes that in order to “be secure against violence from one another,” it is necessary for “individual men, peoples, and states” to “leave the state of nature” and “unite itself with all others (with which it could not help interacting) and subject itself to a public lawful coercion.”33 But “nature wills” against full cosmopolitanism and federal union by employing “differences of language and religion” to maintain “separate peoples” and to “prevent them from mixing.”34 These differences arise as people spread across all habitable parts of the Earth and develop indifferent material environments. International competition and advancing material civilization produce “devastations, revolutions, and even complete exhaustion,” propelling men into a thin “league of nations,” but these calamities are not so great as to require more substantial unions.35 The growth of commerce occurs to an extent that wars become irrational, but not to the extent that the preservation of independent states and distinct nations becomes untenable. In short, key particulars of Kant’s imagined world of perpetual peace derive from particular and historically contingent assumptions he makes about geography. In the Second Article of his perpetual peace plan, Kant argues that the state-of-war anarchy can only be replaced with an established peace through a federative league of peace in which republican states pledge nonaggression and mutual defense. Often hailed (or condemned) as a proponent of a universal federal union with an authoritative government over its constituents to nation-​state members, Kant clearly envisions an institutionally modest arrangement, a sort of “amity international,” rather than government. Taken as a whole, such an arrangement would be a modified anarchical state system, and Kant emphasizes that he is not advocating a world state. But by linking his institutional arrangements so firmly to the extent of interdependence, Kant provides the basis for thinking that a world government of some sort would be appropriate in a situation with much greater interdependence that he perceived or envisioned.36 33. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 124 (my emphasis). 34. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 113. 35. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” 18. 36.  This path is followed by the contemporary theorists that Luis Cabrera refers to as the “interdependence Rawlsians,” who point in part to the scope of contemporary economic interdependence to justify the inclusion of everyone into a global scheme of distributive justice. See Luis Cabrera, “Poverty, Inequality, and Global Distributive Justice,” in Patrick Hayden, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Ethics and International Relations (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 293–​308. Among those who follow this path all the way to at least a de facto world government is Pogge, “Kant’s Vision,” at 205. [ 268 ]  Daniel H. Deudney

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The real spatial frontiers of Kant’s cosmopolitanism, however, extend beyond the Earth and its thickening interdependencies into a vastly more extensive domain. It is notable that Kant, while positing thin obligations based on the horizon of terrestrial finitude, extended the cosmopolitan community to literally cosmic dimensions by including intelligent life forms—​aliens—​ in its membership.37 It is often overlooked that Kant, following the prevalent Enlightenment “plurality of worlds” interpretation of the Copernican Revolution, thought it likely that intelligent beings populated innumerable other celestial bodies in this solar system and beyond, thus pushing the cosmopolitan moral community to the cosmic scope that Seneca had intimated.38 In extending the moral community of reason-​bearing beings to include extraterrestrial aliens located across the awesome voids of interplanetary and interstellar space, Kant thus completes the detachment of cosmopolitan moral obligation from any terrestrial geography of place, or even human corporeal form.

11.5 THIRD COSMOPOLITANISM AND PLANETARY EARTH

Third cosmopolitanism, as we saw at the outset of this chapter, is very diverse. Its largest cluster, known as “interdependence cosmopolitanism,” clearly speaks to the key feature of Planetary Earth. And many third-​cosmopolitan thinkers embrace ambitious agendas for world government configured with various liberal, democratic, federal, and constitutional elements. In both these aspects, third cosmopolitanism is clearly following in Kant’s footsteps, but to very different degrees. In its support for broadly republican world government, third cosmopolitanism clearly goes beyond Kant in pushing for political arrangements that are far more comprehensive than anything he supported. But, like Kant’s “republican constitutions,” the institutional program of third cosmopolitanism largely borrows rather than innovates. In its geography, its understanding of the material context of human activity, third cosmopolitanism is arguably less developed than Kant’s, even if more up to date. As we have seen, Kant’s geography, sparse as it is and overlooked as it is, clearly plays a key role in defining the scope of community,

37. David Clark, “Kant’s Aliens: The Anthropology and Its Others,” New Centennial Review 1, no. 2 (2001): 201–​89. 38.  This topic has been treated in several outstanding volumes:  Michael Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–​1900:  The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1986); Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds:  The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Karl S. Guthke, The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds from the Copernican Revolution to Modern Science Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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as well as important features of the architecture of his envisioned national and international institutions. But one looks in vain for any third-​cosmopolitan engagement with the contours of the variegated materialities that define Planetary Earth, or innovative ideas about the character of institutions suited to addressing the problems they have generated. Also, third cosmopolitanism has clearly moved beyond Kant’s political quietism and reliance on the deus ex machina of “nature’s secret plan.”39 But the continuing absence of a positive theory of affect leaves their activist political agendas largely without inspiration, and thus largely impotent. A brief glance at the major defining features of Planetary Earth, and how they have given rise to a new politics of species interest, as well as a very thick politics of place, will bring into view the main reasons why it is inappropriate to look to third cosmopolitanism as the main answer to the core questions of the terrapolitan project. Despite these limitations, the normative orientations of cosmopolitanism still have several important contributions to help make terrapolitan orders both humane and human, which can be briefly outlined as the final step in the argument. The basic feature of Planetary Earth is simple: human agency is now situated in a vastly complex aggregation of human-​machine-​nature assemblages that have been generated by the explosive growth over the last century of science-​ based technology occurring within the finite-​bounded, geophysical, and biophysical features of the planet Earth. The human world is now marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity, and the Earth as a whole has become a place. In the past, small numbers of humans were thickly embedded into highly variegated material environments that were spatially very small, and at most loosely connected. But today, swollen numbers of humanity are now intensively interactive and interdependent through vast networks of complex machines and built infrastructures that span the planet, and whose “unintended consequences” and “spillovers” have grown to planetary scope and species significance. The reason that humanity is now in a “global village” or even “spaceship Earth” situation is not that it has adopted the universal affiliations, communities, and political forms advocated by cosmopolitans, but rather because human “mastery” of the material world has increased in such revolutionary ways. Indeed, it is precisely the deep disjuncture between these new villagelike proximities and interactions on a global/​ planetary scale and the contemporary absence of more comprehensive forms of affiliations, communities, and political forms that makes the universalism of cosmopolitanism seem so relevant to the real, contemporary human situation. Thus, to the extent that contemporary cosmopolitanism is widely held to be practically relevant, it is because of this material transformation of things

39. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” eighth thesis. [ 270 ]  Daniel H. Deudney

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and places—​a change whose logic and occurrence is external to the cosmopolitan approach. Unfortunately, moral cosmopolitanism offers a poor foundation for the erection of global institutions because it has little purchase on the material characteristics of the problems that pose threats to universal human interests. Intimations that “distance is abolished” and that “technology is in the saddle” have been staples of thought and anticipation since the first fruits of the Industrial Revolution were deployed in the nineteenth century. But the extent of the contemporary “geography of proximity” on a planetary scale is so novel in its form and magnitude that its full ramifications for political arrangements and political thought have only begun to be adequately comprehended or registered. With the thermonuclear revolution and the deployment of large numbers of nuclear weapons prepared for effectively instant use, the survival of civilization—​and perhaps the human species—​now rests in the hands of the leaders of states.40 With the Internet and the contemporary global telecommunications infrastructure, the communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s anticipation of an “electronic global village” has been realized, as several billion people are now in effectively instantaneous communication linkages at global distances. With deployed bytes of cybernetic processors increasing at a rate of approximately 10 trillion per second, a “planetary panopticon” of total surveillance is rapidly being woven, creating a totally new context for all human activity, as well as the prospect of totalitarian rule with previously unimaginable efficiency and scope. And with artificial superintelligence ominously on the horizon, humanity’s “final invention” may soon, and suddenly, extinguish humanity.41 The surge in human numbers and human industrial and economic activity occurring within the finite confines of the Earth’s thin and fragile biosphere has grown to such a magnitude that the basic chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans is changing to such an extent that geologists now speak of a new epoch in the Earth’s history, the Anthropocene.42 With irreversible climate change now under way, the question is not whether the geography of rainfall and storms or of deserts and droughts will change, but 40. The best account remains Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Knopf, 1982). The best overall treatment of the contemporary horizons of risk is found in Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic, eds, Global Catastrophic Risks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 41.  For profiles of this threat, see James Barrat, Our Final Invention:  Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era (New  York:  St Martin’s Press, 2013); and Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 42.  P. J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415/​6867 (2002):  2–​23; and Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene:  Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” AMBIO:  A Journal of the Human Environment 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–​21.

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rather whether humanity will blunder across difficult-​to-​anticipate thresholds and tipping points to a major alteration of the planet that will reconfigure the geography of the habitable Earth so extensively as to condemn billions to starvation and major conurbations to inundation. With these unfolding and brewing storms of change unleashed by the relentless juggernaut of science-​based machine civilization, the new features of Planetary Earth as a place are creating interest and survival imperatives for political and ethical actions that burst beyond the bounds of the duty-​centered ethical claims of cosmopolitan thought. Humanity as a whole faces challenges that push into the moral and political sphere a set of choices affecting the most basic and universal interest of species survival. Humanity is now in a situation where the contours and claims of Terra beneath our feet and enveloping our bodies, not the morally awesome starry sky above our heads, provide the decisive compass for orienting human activity. Our primary concern must now be with the footprints of our species, not its divine sparks. In this situation, the fundamental problem is not the chronic and age-​old insufficiency of humanity’s attention to their moral duties toward distant or less powerful others, but rather the near universal incapacity of humans to accurately perceive where their basic interests actually now stand. The central problem is not that humans are too self-​interested and insufficiently attentive to the needs of others, but rather that they are not adequately and intelligently self-​interested enough. The capacity of humans to pursue their basic interests in survival, so amply demonstrated across history, has been short-​ circuited by practical epistemological limitations. In part, these limitations stem from the utter novelty of the threats to basic interests that have arisen with such historical rapidity. Human agency has been massively amplified by technological enhancements, but human perception of the consequences of this super-​empowered agency lags woefully behind. Furthermore, the sheer complexity and consequent unpredictability of the natural and technological systems in which humans are enmeshed and entangled pose fundamental epistemological problems for practical agency.43 In the wake of this planetary material transformation, activities that in the past could be deemed “humanitarian” are increasingly compelled by self-​ interest. A  good example of this change is the recent outbreak of Ebola in several small countries in West Africa. Prior to the intense interconnections forged by globalization, the outbreak of this disease would have been of primary concern to those in the countries where the outbreak was located, and efforts by outsiders to combat it would be of a humanitarian character. But the substantial efforts by governments on other continents to rush capacities into place to contain and eradicate this disease are now quite explicitly based 43.  Mitchell Thomashow, Bringing the Biosphere Home:  Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). [ 272 ]  Daniel H. Deudney

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on self-​interest: if the disease is not stopped there, it is sure to spread here. Actions which were once humanitarian have now become self-​interested in the tightly coupled and interdependent world produced by the globalization of machine civilization. The new, practical geography of Planetary Earth, and a politics suitable to it, have much in common with the politan, place-​based associations that cosmopolitanism has sought to abstract from over the course of its quest for an amaterial moral universalism. The features of the transformed material Earth, and thus the ethical and political forms suitable to them, are placelike, not spacelike.44 The politan particular has not been replaced by something larger that is its negation, but rather has expanded to a much larger, planetwide scale. The distant and practically unobtainable horizon has disappeared on Earth, and the universally expansive spatial grid has wrapped around into a sphere marked by thick particularities. In short, the Earth as a whole is now a place. Thinking of the Earth as a whole as a place with very distinctive, even extraordinary characteristics has been significantly bolstered by the new geographic knowledge gained since the late nineteenth century about other celestial bodies. Kant and other adherents of the “plurality of worlds” doctrine routinely assumed that many other bodies in this solar system had not only life, but intelligent life. But modern astronomy and space science have demonstrated that the numerous celestial bodies in this solar system, and far beyond, are harshly forbidding places, while also establishing how massively the character of this planet has been shaped by the life which has flourished here in such abundance for billions of years. Another marker of the geography of Planetary Earth is the widespread tendency among environmental thinkers and activists to think of the Earth as a place that can potentially command the types of topophilic attachments previously associated with smaller places to serve as the basis for a planetary-​ scope ethic of proximity.45 This type of Earth-​place sensibility amounts to a kind of Earth nationalism. It casts the planet itself as the Earth mother source of all life that is in some important way sacred. These approaches all reverse the basic geography and value axis of cosmopolitanism, finding moral ground in the Earth beneath, not the starry skies. These contemporary Whole Earth characterizations of this planet as a distinct and unique place find their iconic

44. A helpful way of thinking about the primacy of mapping is provided in Stephen S. Hall, “Introduction:  Latitude, Longitude, Infinitude:  Scientific Mapping and the Reinvention of Geography,” Mapping the Next Millennium:  The Discovery of New Geographies (New York: Random House, 1992), 3–​29. 45. For synoptic treatment of new Earth place thinking, see Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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representational form in photographic images of the Earth taken from outer space, the space of complete emptiness.46 The limitations of third cosmopolitanism in grappling with the complex material realities that constitute Planetary Earth and its thick place-​politan aspects and potentials are paralleled by an almost complete disengagement by recent cosmopolitans of new developments in cosmology. Where Kant took cosmopolitan thinking in new directions by absorbing the implications of the Copernican Revolution and the new terrestrial geography produced by Renaissance and Enlightenment explorations, one looks in vain for third-​ cosmopolitan employment of the revolutionary discoveries produced by astronomy over the last century. One way to start such an engagement would be to recognize that as the Earth has been transformed into a place, “space” is increasingly no longer of the Earth, but rather has been displaced off the planet into cosmic “outer space.” And, like cosmopolitanism for much of its history, a new and vastly expanded technological space-​age version of cosmopolitanism advances an Earth-​leaving ethical and political agenda.47 These projects to leave the Earth behind have no realistic prospect for near-​term practical realization, but serve as an inspirational and escapist social imaginary of utopian transcendence from the particularities, constraints, and finitudes of place, now Terra herself. Until astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) bear fruit, the community of reason-​bearing beings to whom moral obligations are owed beyond the tightening terrestrial sphere of an enlightened, Earth-​bound self-​interest remains an unpopulated null set. Despite these limitations of third cosmopolitanism in grappling with the realities of Planetary Earth and contributing to the core questions posed by the terrapolitan project, cosmopolitanism still has several important contributions to make. In thinking about possible world orders responsive to the new species interests created by the globalization of machine civilization, it should be emphasized that there are likely to be multiple ways in which these interests could be served, not all of them humane or even human in character. Even narrowing the consideration to world orders that are liberal,

46. Ruminations on the implications of seeing the Earth from space come in many varieties: Ralph K. White, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise: or the Globalization of the World Picture,” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 602–​30; Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); and Kelly Oliver, Earth and World: Philosophy After Apollo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 47. For Earth escapism, see David Lavery, Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age (Carbondale, IL:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1992); and Robert Zubrin, Entering Space:  Creating a Spacefaring Civilization (New  York:  Jeremy P.  Tarcher & Putnam, 1999). [ 274 ]  Daniel H. Deudney

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democratic, federal, and constitutional may leave important room for considerable variation. Perhaps most important, third cosmopolitanism’s core commitment to the proposition that all humans have equal claim to basic rights, both procedural and substantive, can help ensure that democracy is not merely formal, and that it does not become a façade for narrow oligarchic interests. It can also help ensure that political solutions to common species threats are configured so that the burdens of adjustment and the experience of risks are equitably shared. In practical terms, this is a dauntingly difficult goal, and one whose realization profoundly challenges the current world order, marked by high stratifications of wealth and power. Second, the ethical humanistic kernel at the center of cosmopolitanism may carry important weight in shaping emerging practical choices of great significance related to the transhumanist and posthumanist movements and agendas. Among the many revolutionary possibilities opened by the acceleration of modern scientific-​technological civilization, the transhumanist project of transforming the biological foundations of humanity through the employment of advanced techniques of genetic engineering is both extremely seductive and dangerous.48 Like its scientifically and technologically premature predecessor, the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, the transhumanist project of “straightening the crooked timber of humanity” is ripe with potential for great abuse. A crucial question is whether prospective enhancements will be universally available or confined only to wealthy individuals or citizens of wealthy states. In the face of this prospect of biological stratification, cosmopolitan moral norms demand that only a path of universal enhancement be pursued. Third, the humanistic core of cosmopolitanism speaks to the emerging agendas of posthumanism—​the notion that humans are not unique in either consciousness, agency, or claim to moral consideration. Moderate versions of this agenda, cast as “rights of nature,” have played a prominent and influential role in environmental theory and practice for many decades.49 Newer, self-​ styled posthumanists go even further, claiming that the anthropocenticity of modern civilization is at the root of the emerging planetary catastrophe of climate change.50 In this line of thinking, humanity has falsely elevated itself above other diverse sentient beings, and only by dethroning humanity and its 48.  For an overview of emerging disputes, see James J. Hughes, “The Politics of Transhumanism and the Techno-​Millennial Imagination, 1626–​2030,” Zygon 4, no. 2 (2012): 757–​76. 49.  Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature:  A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 50. For overviews, see Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), and Jami Weinstein and Claire Colebrook, eds., Posthumous Life:  Theorizing Beyond the Posthuman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

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self-​serving humanisms can the planet be saved from catastrophe. Here too, the humanism of cosmopolitanism may find a powerful vocation in preventing posthumanism from devolving into antihumanism and legitimating inhumane practices. And finally, the early cosmopolitan Stoic emphasis on self-​discipline, still present in Kant in some measure but largely jettisoned by third cosmopolitans, may be ripe for revival and relevance. Overconsumption beyond reasonable needs is clearly a factor in propelling environmental despoliation. In response, environmental theory and practice have increasingly emphasized the importance of developing new bodily practices and new forms of self-​restraints, often cast as “voluntary simplicity,” which is in effect a new virtue-​politics attuned to the new Planetary Earth and its problems. Here too, cosmopolitanism may have neglected, but vital conceptual resources to contribute to the terrapolitan project.

11.6 CONCLUSION

This chapter has explored the geographies of cosmopolitanism and the relationship between cosmopolitanism and space and place. Looking at the geographies of different cosmopolitanisms helps explain the great differences between ancient, early modern, and recent versions of the approach. Examining the geography of cosmopolitanism provides insight into the nature of Kant’s revolutionary revision of it, as well as the limitations and strengths of contemporary third cosmopolitanism, and its relationship to pressing planetary problems. Geography played an often-​overlooked, but key role in the second cosmopolitanism developed by Kant. Recognition of global interdependence is a prominent feature of many contemporary third cosmopolitans. But the geography of contemporary cosmopolitanism is otherwise thin and underdeveloped. As a result, contemporary third cosmopolitanism lacks the conceptual tools to apprehend major features of contemporary Planetary Earth. Because of these limitations, third cosmopolitanism is unable to play a central role in contributing to the terrapolitan project. Despite these limitations, contemporary cosmopolitanism still makes several important contributions to the terrapolitan project.

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INDEX

Figures and notes are indicated by “f ” and “n” following page numbers. affirmative action, 144–​145 African Union, 148 agency of global governance institution actors, 122, 126 moral reciprocal, 235, 247–​249, 251 political, state responsibility and, 62–​64, 66, 75, 78 Algeria, popular resource sovereignty lack in, 24, 54 Aliyev, Ilham, 29 All affected principle, 7–9, 110–​111, 164–​165, 179–​182, 219–​220 Angola, popular resource sovereignty lack in, 24, 28, 54 Animación Urbana, 215 Annan, Kofi, 70 Anthropocene, 271 antihumanism, 276 Archibugi, Daniele, 83 Archipelago Earth, 256 Aristotle, 248, 263 Asencultura, 214 Ashton, Catherine, 70 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 147 Aurelius, Marcus, 10, 254, 264 Australia popular resource sovereignty in, 28 subnational peoples in, 33 authoritarianism, popular sovereignty vs., 24–​25, 49, 55–​57 Azerbaijan, popular resource sovereignty in, 29

Banco de Oportunidades–​Cultura E, 214 Barrett, Scott, 126 Bartelson, Jens, 267 Beardsworth, Richard, 59 Beck, Ulrich, 193–​194 Beitz, Charles, 83 Belgium, electoral system in, 224 beneficent despotism, 49–​53 Benhabib, Seyla, 84, 98, 233 Biblioteca Pública Piloto, 214 Blair, Tony, 28 Blake, Michael, 59–​60 Blandon, Jorge, 210 Bobbio, Norberto, 162–​163 Bohman, James, 83, 90, 96–​98, 243 Brazil municipal cosmopolitan governance in, 195, 196 popular resource sovereignty in, 29, 39 trade policies, 242–​243 Britain. See United Kingdom Brown, Garrett W., 80, 85–​86, 102 Brown, Gordon, 70 Buchanan, Allen, 131–132, 134–​136, 138, 140–​144, 146, 149, 153 Bush, George W., 28, 40 Cabrera, Luis, 35, 130, 255 Cajas de Compensacion, 209, 213 Calhoun, Craig, 237 Canada popular resource sovereignty in, 39 subnational peoples in, 31, 32–​33

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Caney, Simon, 107, 134, 143, 145 capacity as condition for authorization, 45–​46 state responsibility based on, 66–​67,  68 transnational coordinative, 55, 58 Caribbean Community, 148 Casa Amarilla, 208, 210, 214 Casas de la Cultura, 215 Cassese, Antonio, 26 Cedezos, 213 Chavez, Hugo, 29 China climate change policies, 124 human rights covenants in, 30 municipal development in, 207 state responsibility stance of, 69 subnational peoples in, 32 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 264 citizens/​citizenship cosmopolitan,  10–​11 good international citizen concept, 5, 12, 64, 68–​69 institutionally-​oriented global, 145 outsiders vs., 12–​13, 64, 69, 79–​104 popular resource sovereignty requirements of, 31–​35 spatialized, in Medellín, 207–​208, 209 state responsibility to, 12, 64, 69,  71–​77 city governance. See municipal cosmopolitan governance civil liberties global governance institutions’ respect for, 138–​139 international organizations’ democratic quality related to, 162, 174–​176 popular resource sovereignty and, 47–​48,  53 climate change cosmopolitan morality influencing approach to, 4 eco-​cosmopolitans addressing, 254 European Union addressing, 220 global governance institutions addressing, 13–​14, 109, 115, 118–​121, 123–​127 globalization influencing approach to, 18, 271–​272

[ 278 ] Index

institutional cosmopolitanism facing challenges of, 7 international organizations addressing, 173, 182 municipal response to, 189 state responsibility to address, 12, 61, 62, 67, 72, 74, 75–​76, 120–​121 world state addressing, 249 Clinton, Bill, 70 Cohen, Jean, 84 Colombia, municipal cosmopolitan governance in, 15–​16, 195–​215 colonial system, 31–​32, 183, 245 Comites de Escala Barrial, 214 commodified cosmopolitanism, 194 Comoros, popular resource sovereignty in, 53n83 Congo. See Democratic Republic of Congo Consejería Presidencial Para Medellín, 212 Consejo Municipal de Cultura, 215 constitutions domestic cosmopolitan, 12–​13,  79–​104 global governance institutions governed by, 115 municipal cosmopolitan governance supported by, 210 popular resource sovereignty addressed in, 27, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42,  56–​57 UN charter as international, 26 world state constitution, 234 Convention Against Torture, 175 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, 175 Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 175 Convocatorias de Fomento al Arte y la Cultura, 215 Cooke, Robert, 68 Corporación Cutural Nuestra Gente, 215 Corporación Region 1989, 214 cosmopolitan institutions European Union as, 16–​17, 216–​231 geography, globalization and, 18, 253–​276

9 7 2

municipalities/​cities as, 15–​16, 189–​215 overview,  15–​18 world state as, 17–​18, 232–​252 cosmopolitanism ancient Stoic, 18, 254–​255, 258, 262–​265,  276 as commodity, 194 cosmopolitan citizenship, 10–​11 cosmopolitan democracy, 7, 83, 233, 250 cosmopolitan extraterritoriality,  99–​101 cosmopolitan harm principle, 80, 86–​87, 89, 90–​91, 94, 95, 96, 99, 101, 102 cosmopolitan justice, 17, 232–​235, 237–​252 cosmopolitan urbanism, 193 (see also municipal cosmopolitan governance) definition of, 2–​4, 232–​233 domestic cosmopolitan constitutions, 12–​13,  79–​104 eco-​cosmopolitans,  254 Enlightenment-​era, 18, 253, 254–​255, 265–​269 evolution or three waves of, 18, 253–​ 258 (see also first, second, third subentries) first, 18, 254–​255, 258, 262–​265,  276 geographic aspects of, 18, 256–​276 hyphenated, 254 institutional (see institutional cosmopolitanism) interactional, 5 Kantian perspective on, 18, 254–​255, 257, 265–​269 (see also Kant, Immanuel) moral (see moral cosmopolitanism) political, 63–​64, 243 progressive, 252 second, 18, 254–​255, 257, 265–​269 sovereignty and, 11–​13 (see also sovereignty) terrapolitanism, 18, 257, 261–​262, 262f, 270–​276 thick, 81, 92 third, 18, 254–​257, 269–​276

Council of Europe, 174 Council of the European Union, 221, 223 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 26, 33, 175 Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 26, 141 Cranston, Maurice, 31, 32–​33 Crawford, Neta, 183 Creación del Comité Interinstitucional, 215 Cruz, Teddy, 189 Dahl, Robert, 164 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, 183 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 245 deliberation, democratic, 162, 173–​174, 218–​219 democracy/​democratic participation all affected approach to, 110–​111, 164–​165, 179–​182, 219–​220 assessment criteria for quality of, 159–​165,  160f civilizing force of, 218–​219, 221–222, 223–​225 civil liberty protections in, 162, 174–​176 constitutional approach to, 9n28 (see also constitutions) cosmopolitan, 7, 83, 233, 250 deliberation in, 162, 173–​174, 218–​219 demoi-​cracy, 16, 221–​222, 223–​227 demos-​cracy, 17, 223, 225, 227, 228–​231 dimensions of, 159–​165, 160f disciplining force of, 219 educational force of, 217–​218, 221, 222, 223–​225 electoral systems in (see electoral systems) equality goals and protections in, 127–​128, 136, 138, 139, 142, 162, 176–​178, 184 equal regard and, 136, 138–139 European Union’s, 16–​17, 168, 216–​231

Index  [ 279 ]

0 8 2

democracy/​democratic participation (Cont.) global governance institutions’ approach to, 13–​15, 107–​129, 134–​135, 136–​142, 145, 154–155, 158–​185 global political integration and, 6–​9, 13, 34–​35, 111, 136, 250 (see also world state) individual duties in relation to, 14, 134–​135, 136–​142,  145 international organizations and, 14–15, 154–​155, 158–​185 participation requirements, 7–​9, 14–15, 89, 92, 110–​111, 137, 161, 171–​173 people as constituents of, composition of, 163–​165, 179–​183 policy options and implementation in, 162–​163, 178–​179 popular sovereignty/​resource sovereignty and, 11, 23–​25, 34–​35, 48,  55–​58 procedural approach to, 7–​9, 13–​14, 110–​117, 121, 124–​125, 127–​129,  145n54 property rights protections in, 162, 179–​180,  248 state responsibility and, 76–​77 subject to law approach to, 110–​111, 165, 182–​183, 220 virtues of, 217–​220, 246–​251 world state opposition based on, 235–​239 world state principles of, 17, 233–​235, 239–​252 Democratic Republic of Congo, popular resource sovereignty lack in, 55 Deudney, Daniel, 73–​75, 253 Diogenes the Cynic, 10 domestic cosmopolitan constitutions advantages of adopting, 103–​104 cosmopolitan extraterritoriality and,  99–​101 cosmopolitan harm principle and, 80, 86–​87, 89–​91, 94–96, 99, 101–102 garantiste provisions of, 96–​97,  98–​101

[ 280 ] Index

global political integration vs., 12, 80, 83–​85, 88–​89, 91–​96,  103 human rights addressed in, 100, 103 justice support via, 83, 85 Kantian perspective on, 80–​82, 87–​90 legal redress of outsiders under, 101 legitimacy of, 85, 88, 103–​104 motivation to adopt, 103 nondomination principles for, 89–​99,  102 outsider treatment under, 12–​13,  79–​104 overview, 12–​13, 79–​81, 101–​104 republican theory on, 12, 80–​81, 87–​99,  102 self-​determination support via, 80, 85, 87–​88,  92 social contracts and, 81–​87, 88–​96 transnational legal order superseding, 83–​85, 88–​89, 91–​96,  103 domestic redistribution, 141 Dryzek, John, 125, 162 duties of individuals. See individual duties Dworkin, Ronald, 146 Echeverri, Alejandro, 199, 206, 208 Eckersley, Robyn, 123–​125 eco-​cosmopolitans,  254 economic issues domination by strong states over, 94 global governance institutions addressing, 109–​110, 123, 147 international organizations addressing, 15, 170–​172, 176–​178, 184 (see also International Monetary Fund; World Bank; World Trade Organization) municipal cosmopolitan governance of, 191–​192, 197, 201–​203, 206–​208,  210 popular resource sovereignty and, 35, 50–​51, 53, 55 poverty as (see poverty) state responsibility to address, 61–​62, 66–​67, 72, 74, 76–​77 taxes/​taxation as, 76, 207 trade issues (see trade) world state and, 243–​244

1 8 2

Ecuador, subnational peoples in, 32 ED (Empresa de Diseño Urbano), 206 EDU (Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano de Medellín), 212 education educational force of EU electoral systems, 217–​218, 221–222, 223–​225 municipal governance commitment to, 207, 209, 213 redistribution of knowledge and, 196, 204, 206–​207, 209 egalitarianism. See equality/​ egalitarianism Egypt, economic growth in, 50 electoral systems educational force of, 217–​218, 221–​225 European Union’s, 217–​218, 220–​229 global governance institution electoral accountability, 115–​116, 138, 144–145 immunity from, 220 international organization electoral constestation, 161, 168–​171,  169f Elster, Jon, 218 Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano de Medellín (EDU), 212 Empresa de Diseño Urbano (ED), 206 Empresas Publicas de Medellín (EPM), 207, 213 energy. See oil and gas Enlightenment-​era cosmopolitanism, 18, 253, 254–​255, 265–​269 environmental issues and regulations climate change (see climate change) Earth nationalism and, 273–​274 eco-​cosmopolitans addressing, 254 global governance institutions addressing, 109 popular resource sovereignty compatibility with, 40–​41 Epictetus, 254 EPM (Empresas Publicas de Medellín), 207, 213 equality/​egalitarianism democratic protection of, 127–​ 128, 136, 138–139, 142, 162, 176–​178,  184

global governance institution consideration of, 127–​128, 136, 138–139, 142 individual duties for, 136, 138–139 international organization protection of, 162, 176–​178, 184 municipal cosmopolitan governance egalitarian agendas or ends, 189, 191–​192, 195–​196, 197, 200–212 municipal cosmopolitan governance of inequality, 201–​203 radical moral egalitarianism, 264 Equatorial Guinea, popular resource sovereignty lack in, 28, 48, 49, 51 Escobar, Pablo, 196–197, 208 European Citizens’ Initiatives, 229 European Commission, 223, 226, 228 European Convention on Human Rights, 174 European Council, 221, 223 European Court of Human Rights, 147, 174 European Court of Justice, 147 European Parliament, 17, 223–​226 European Union cession of national sovereignty in, 75 civilizing force of democracy in, 218–219, 221–​225 cross-​border externalities in, 220–​221 deep trouble in, 216–​217 democratic practice in, 16–​17, 168, 216–​231 demoi-​cracy in, 16, 221–​222, 223–​227 demos-​cracy in, 17, 223, 225, 227, 228–​231 disciplining force of decision enforcement in, 219 educational force of electoral systems in, 217–​218, 221–​225 electoral immunity in, 220 English use in, 230–​231 individual duties for critical compliance with, 147 individual duties for reform efforts in, 148 institutional cosmopolitanism of, 16–17, 216–​231 language considerations in, 225n14, 226, 229–​231

Index  [ 281 ]

2 8

European Union (Cont.) legitimacy of, 103–​104, 133, 219, 226–​229 municipal development in, 207 nuclear weapons control in, 35 overview, 16–​17, 216–​217 pan-​European constituency of, 223–​226 proportional representation in, 227–​229 as regional international organization, 168, 179 trade policies, 179 UK exit from, 16n37, 132, 147 virtues of democracy in, 217–​220 Evans, Garth, 68, 69 extraterritoriality, cosmopolitan, 99–​101 Fajardo, Sergio, 199, 201–​210, 212 fiduciary responsibilities, 41–​44 first cosmopolitanism, 18, 254–​255, 258, 262–​265,  276 Formación de Públicos, 215 Forman, Fonna, 189 France Pheasant Island shared sovereignty of, 36 subnational peoples in, 31, 32 Franck, Thomas, 115–​116 Fraser, Nancy, 111n16 freedom of press, 47, 138, 170, 176, 247 freedom of speech, 138, 170, 176 Gaddafi, Muammar, 29 Galería Urbana, 214 Gauck, Joachim, 229–​231 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 170–​172, 179 generality, cosmopolitanism defined by, 3 geography ancient Stoic cosmopolitanism and, 262–​265 Archipelago Earth, 256 climate change reconfiguration of, 272 (see also climate change) cosmopolitanism evolution with, 256–​276 Global Earth, 256 Kantian cosmopolitanism and, 257, 265–​269

[ 282 ] Index

overview of cosmopolitanism and, 18, 253–​258,  276 Planetary Earth, 256–​257, 269–​276 space and place in, 256–262, 262f, 266–​267, 269–​274,  276 Germany, states within, 32 Ghana, popular resource sovereignty in, 29, 42, 46 Global Earth, 256 global governance institutions advisory bodies in, role of, 116 agency of actors in, 122, 126 climate change considerations for, 13– 14, 109, 115, 118–​121, 123–​127 comparative benefits of, 135 compliance/​critical compliance with, 14, 131–​133, 137, 140, 146–​148 consent of states in, 135 constitutional structures and decision-​ making procedures for, 115 cooperation in, 125–​127 creation of new, 14, 151–​152 deadlock in, 122–​127 democratic principles underlying, 13–15, 107–​129, 134–​135, 136– 142, 145, 154–​155, 158–​185 electoral accountability in, 115–​116, 138, 144–145 end state vision for, 139–​142, 152 entitlement realization in, 118–​120,  138 epistemic virtue of, 135–​136 equality, importance to and challenges for, 127–​128, 136, 138–139, 142 global political integration and, 13, 109–​113, 121, 124–​125, 127–129, 142–​145 imprecise character of institutional design of, 121–​122 inclusion and effective action in, 123–​125,  147 indeterminacy of distributive justice with, 118–​121 indeterminacy of procedural justice with, 113–​117 individual duties toward, 14, 130–​153 instrumental approach to global political integration for, 13, 109–​113, 121, 124–​125, 127–​129,  145

3 8 2

international organizations as, 14–​15, 154–​185 justice capacity in, 109, 112, 113–​121, 128, 136, 140–​141, 150, 158 legitimacy of, 124, 130–​136, 137–​139, 150–​152 level of democratic governance in, 114 minilateralism in, 124 minimal moral acceptability of, 135 moral considerations for, 132–​136, 138, 140–​143, 149 multilateralism in, 124 normative ideals for, 109–​112 overview, 13–​15, 107–​109, 128–​129 procedural approach to democracy for, 13–​14, 110–​117, 121, 124–​125, 127–​129,  145n54 affectedness view of, 110–​111 subject to law approach to, 110–​111 reform of flawed, 14, 148–​149, 156–​158 rejection of fundamentally flawed, 14, 149–​151 responsibility discharge in, 118, 120–​121 states vs., 107–​109, 111, 120–​121, 143–​144,  151 supremacy of, 108–​109, 132–​134 tensions for, 112–​113 transparency of, 135–​136, 147 unified vs. fragmented political order for, 114–​115, 117 globalization cosmopolitanism evolution with, 18, 253–​276 nuclear weapons control and, 18, 35, 271 overview of geography of cosmopolitanism and, 18, 253–​258,  276 state responsibility in era of, 11–​12,  59–​78 terrapolitan system with, 18, 257, 261–​262, 262f, 270–​276 third cosmopolitanism and, 18, 254–257, 269–​276 global political integration democracy and, 6–​9, 13, 34–​35, 111, 136, 250 (see also world state)

domestic cosmopolitan constitutions vs., 12, 80, 83–​85, 88–​89, 91–​96,  103 European Union as regional version of (see European Union) global governance institutions for (see global governance institutions) individual duties toward goal of, 142–​145 institutional cosmopolitanism goals of, 4–​​8,  61 instrumental approach to, 6–​7, 13, 109–​113, 121, 124–​125, 127–​129,  145 pooling sovereignty and, 72–​73, 74– 75, 77, 151–152 state responsibility and, 12, 62–​78 world state as, 17–​18, 232–​252 Global Resource Dividend, 41 Goldsmith, Jack, 113 Goodin, Robert, 249 good international citizen concept, 5, 12, 64,  68–​69 Görlich, Matthias, 199 Graham, Bob, 27, 38 Green, Leslie, 71 Grigorescu, Alexandru, 173–​174 grounded normative theory, 192 health issues capacity for decision making on, 45 globalization and approach to, 272–​273 international organization comparisons related to, 157 state responsibility to address, 61 Hegel, G. W. F., 30 Held, David, 17, 83, 111 Helm, Dieter, 126 Herrera, Luis Alberto Lacalle, 172 Hobbes, Thomas, 82 human rights cosmopolitanism defined in relation to, 2 democratic participation supporting,  7–​8 domestic cosmopolitan constitutions on, 100, 103 global governance institutions’ stance on, 138–​139, 141–​145, 150–​152

Index  [ 283 ]

4 8 2

human rights (Cont.) global political integration and, 7–​8 individual duties and respect for, 138–​ 139, 141–​145, 150–​152 institutional cosmopolitanism defined in relation to, 60–​61 international organizations democratic quality related to, 174–​178 moral cosmopolitanism and respect for, 5 municipal stances on, 189–​190, 210 popular resource sovereignty ties to, 11, 26–​27, 30–​31, 35, 39, 40 to self-​determination, 26, 30 state responsibility for, 65, 69 UN addressing, 11, 23, 26, 30–​31, 39–40, 103, 141, 148 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 23, 26, 39, 103, 141 world state honoring of, 237–​238, 241 hyphenated cosmopolitanism, 254 immigration, 95, 98, 142, 189, 241, 241n29, 266 impartiality cosmopolitanism defined in relation to,  3–​4 state responsibility and, 59, 61–​62, 63n13, 76, 77 INDER (Instituto de Deportes y Recreación de Medellín), 213 India human rights covenants in, 30 municipal cosmopolitan governance in, 211 popular resource sovereignty in, 39 indigenous peoples and rights colonial system imposed on, 31–​32, 183, 245 popular resource sovereignty and,  33–​34 individual duties creation of new institutions as, 14, 151–​152 critical compliance with governance as, 14, 146–​148 democratic principles underlying, 14, 134–​142,  145 end state vision driving, 139–​142, 152 equal regard and, 136, 138–139 [ 284 ] Index

toward global governance institutions, 14, 130–​153 toward global political integration, 142–​145 human rights considerations for, 138–​139, 141–​145, 150–​152 institutionally-​oriented, 145–​152 legitimacy of institutions and, 130–​139, 150–​152 moral considerations for, 132–​136, 138, 140–​143, 149 overview, 14, 130–​132, 152–​153 reform of flawed institutions as, 14, 148–​149 rejection of fundamentally flawed institutions as, 14, 149–​151 rights-​based approach to, 137–​139, 141–​145,  152 individualism cosmopolitanism defined by, 2 democratic participation and, 8–​9 duties of individual with (see individual duties) institutional cosmopolitanism defined by, 60 popular sovereignty and, 23–​27 Indonesia, popular resource sovereignty in, 39, 53 institutional cosmopolitanism citizenship and (see citizens/​ citizenship) cosmopolitan institutions and, 15–​18 (see also cosmopolitan institutions) definition and tenets of, 6, 60–​61 democracy and (see democracy/​ democratic participation) global governance institutions for, 13–​15 (see also global governance institutions) moral cosmopolitanism distinction from, 4–​5 (see also moral cosmopolitanism) overview,  1–​20 sovereignty and, 11–​13 (see also sovereignty) variants of, 6–​9 Instituto de Deportes y Recreación de Medellín (INDER), 213 interactional cosmopolitanism, 5

5 8 2

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 173 International Labour Organization (ILO), 115, 176–178, 184 International Monetary Fund (IMF) democracy effect of, 15 domination of, 238 economic growth projections of,  50–​51 as international organization, 157n8, 167, 170–​172, 176–​177, 178, 184 legitimacy of, 133 international moral skepticism, 3 international organizations all affected approach and, 164–​165, 179–​182 arbitration or adjudication by, 180–​181 assessment of democratic quality of, 159–​165,  160f beneficial vs. detrimental effects of, 184 bureaucratic diffusion in, 170 civil liberty protections in, 162, 174–​176 comparison of present vs. absent status of, 156–​158 comparison to other or hypothetical organizations, 155–​158 deliberation in, 162, 173–​174 democracy and, 14–​15, 154–​155, 158–​185 electoral contestation in, 161, 168–​171,  169f equality goals and protections in, 162, 176–​178,  184 feasibility comparisons for, 155–​157 institutional cosmopolitan call for revision of, 61 intergovernmental organizations as,  14–​15 overview, 14–​15, 154–​155, 183–​185 participation in, 161, 171–​173 people as constituents of, composition of, 163–​165, 179–​183 policy options and implementation in, 162–​163, 178–​179 power of, democratic effects of, 184 property rights protections in, 162, 179–​180 research methodology in studies of, 166–​167, 184–​185

resources for, importance of, 183–​184 subject to law approach to constituents of, 165, 182–​183 Iran, popular resource sovereignty lack in, 24, 29, 54–55 Iraq, popular resource sovereignty lack in, 28, 54–​56 Islam, popular resource sovereignty compatibility with, 53 Jefferson, Thomas, 42 jurisdiction cosmopolitan extraterritoriality extending,  99–​101 metajurisdictional rights, 37n37 popular resource sovereignty and, 36–​37,  40–41 state defined in relation to, 108 justice cosmopolitan, world state supporting, 17, 232–​235, 237–​252 distributive, 83, 118–​121, 140–​141, 250–​251 domestic cosmopolitan constitutions’ support for, 83, 85 global governance institutions capacity for, 109, 112–​121, 128, 136, 140–​141, 150, 158 intergenerational, 116, 220 moral cosmopolitanism focus on, 5–​6 municipal cosmopolitan governance and, 15–​16, 189–​215 popular resource sovereignty qualifications for, 41 procedural, 113–​117 statist justice, 239, 246 Kahler, Miles, 173 Kant, Immanuel on institutional cosmopolitanism,  1–​2 on kingdom of ends and global citizenship, 10 on perpetual peace, 2, 87, 90, 265, 267–​268 on republican theory and cosmopolitanism, 80–​81, 87–​89, 90, 267–​268 second cosmopolitanism and, 18, 254–​255, 257, 265–​269 on social contracts, 82 Index  [ 285 ]

6 8 2

Kazakhstan, popular resource sovereignty lack in, 54 Keohane, Robert, 131, 134–​136, 138, 140–​144, 146, 149, 153 Khamenei, Ali, 29 Koenig-​Archibugi, Mathias, 154 Kokaz, Nancy, 243 Kymlicka, Will, 33–​34 Laborde, Cecile, 90, 93, 94 labor rights, 115, 147, 176, 177–​178,  184 Laski, Harold, 2, 19 Latin America, municipal cosmopolitan governance in, 195–​196. See also Medellín, Colombia Law of Peoples, 237–​245 Lawrence, Peter, 125 Lefebvre, Henri, 195 Lerner, Jaime, 196 Liberia, popular resource sovereignty in, 45 liberty, 26, 56, 82, 89, 135, 140, 142 Library Parks project, 209 Libya, popular resource sovereignty lack in, 24, 25, 29, 55 Lincoln, Abraham, 36 Linklater, Andrew, 79, 82, 86–​87 local governance. See municipal cosmopolitan governance Locke, John, 49 Lu, Catherine, 232 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 29 Macdonald, Terry, 163–​164 Mahama, John, 29 Malaysia, states within, 32 Marchetti, Raffaele, 255 Maritain, Jacques, 39 McLuhan, Marshall, 271 Medellín, Colombia civic freedom goals in, 202 continuing challenges for, 211–​212 coordinated and collaborative federal efforts with, 210–​215 dangerous to exemplary transition in, 196–​199 education commitment in, 207, 209, 213

[ 286 ] Index

egalitarian agendas or ends in, 197, 200–​212 inclusive governance in, 203–​207,  205f inequality prioritized in, 201–​203 infrastructural and architectural interventions in, 197–​​200, 202, 206, 208–​210 Medellín Diagram, 199–​209 municipal cosmopolitan governance in, 15–​16, 195–​215 poverty response in, 197, 201–​203, 207–​208,  210 redistribution of resources and knowledge in, 204, 206–​207, 209 spatialized citizenship in, 207–​209 ULI award for, 198–199 violence reduction in, 197, 201–​203, 207–​208,  210 Medellín Chamber of Commerce, 213 Mercosur, 24, 148 Mesas Permanentes de Trabajo Ciudadano, 215 Mexico municipal cosmopolitan governance in, 211 popular resource sovereignty in, 29, 37, 38 migration, 95, 98, 142, 189 Miller, David, 80, 85, 91, 236–​237, 241 minilateralism, 124 Moellendorf, Darrel, 83 Mohammad bin Salman, 49, 50 moral cosmopolitanism globalization and obsolete tenets of, 18, 271 institutional cosmopolitanism, distinction from, 4–​5 municipal cosmopolitan governance, consistent with, 16, 194 self-​evidence of,  59–​60 state responsibility and, 59–​65,  68–​71 variants of, 5–​6 world state adherence to, 233, 235, 239–​245 morality cosmopolitan evolution of views on, 254, 266–​267, 269, 271, 275

7 8 2

cosmopolitanism defined in relation to, 2–​4, 232–​233 individual duties in relation to, 132–136, 138, 140–​143, 149 international moral skepticism, 3 moral cosmopolitanism (see moral cosmopolitanism) moral legitimacy, of global governance institutions, 132–​136, 138 moral reciprocal agency, 235, 247–​249,  251 moral uncertainty, of global governance institutions, 140–​142 radical moral egalitarianism, 264 Morocco, popular resource sovereignty in, 53 multilateralism, 124 municipal cosmopolitan governance civic freedom goals in, 195–​196, 202 continuing challenges for, 211–​212 coordinated and collaborative federal efforts with, 210–​​215 education commitment in, 207, 209, 213 egalitarian agendas or ends in, 189, 191–​192, 195–​197, 200–212 global city and, 193–​195 grounded normative theory on, 192 as inclusive governance, 203–​207,  205f inequality prioritized in, 201–​203 infrastructural and architectural interventions in, 195–​196, 197–​ 200, 202, 206, 208–​210 justice and social justice focus of, 15–16, 189–​215 in Latin America, generally, 195–​196 in Medellín, Colombia, 15–​16, 195–​215 Medellín Diagram for, 199–​209 overview, 15–​16, 189–​193, 211–​212 poverty response in, 191–​192, 197, 201–​203, 207–​208,  210 redistribution of resources and knowledge in, 196, 204, 206–​207,  209 rogue cities and, 189–​190 sanctuary cities and, 189 spatialized citizenship in, 207–​209

violence reduction in, 197, 201–​203, 207–​208,  210 Nagel, Thomas, 150 Namibia, popular sovereignty in, 56 nationalism domestic biases and, 144 Earth, 273–​274 institutional cosmopolitanism, contrast with, 3 place linked with, 260–​261 resource, 40 state responsibility for risks of, 67, 75 world state vs., 237 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 168, 238 natural resources oil and gas as (see oil and gas) sovereignty over, 37–​39 (see also popular resource sovereignty) Nigeria popular resource sovereignty in, 24, 53 subnational peoples in, 32 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 116, 181, 209 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 24, 148, 172 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 168, 238 Northern Ireland, electoral and governance systems in, 227n15 North Korea, popular resource sovereignty lack in, 47 Norway, popular resource sovereignty in, 29, 39 Nozick, Robert, 36 nuclear weapons globalization, influencing approach to, 18, 35, 271 institutional cosmopolitanism, facing challenges of, 7 state responsibility to address, 12, 61–62, 67, 72, 74–75 Nussbaum, Martha, 264 Obama, Barack, on moral responsibility, 70 Ober, Josiah, 217–​218

Index  [ 287 ]

82

Obiang, Teodoro, 48, 51 oil and gas private ownership of, 40 sovereignty over, 11, 24, 27–​29, 37–38, 45–46, 48–​50, 51–​54, 57 Olano, Ricardo, 203 Ostrom, Elinor, 115 Pan-​African Parliament, 148 Paneatius, 264 Papua New Guinea, popular resource sovereignty in, 39 Paris Agreement, 123 Parlacen, 148 Parlasur, 148 Parque Explora, 209 Pelc, Krzysztof, 242 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 29 Perez, Luis, 210 perpetual peace, 2, 87, 90, 265, 267–​268 Peru, international organizations on trade in, 179 Pettit, Philip, 89, 91–​95, 238–​241, 243 Philpott, Daniel, 108 La Piel de la Memoria, 214 place, cosmopolitanism and geography of, 256–​​262, 262f, 266–​267, 269–​274,  276 Planeación del Desarrollo Zonal, 215 Planetary Earth, 256–​257, 269–​276 Plato, 263 Pogge, Thomas on cosmopolitan harm principle, 80 on global governance institutions, 111, 143 on Global Resources Dividend, 41 on impartiality, 3, 59, 61–62 international organizations, views of, 14, 155, 157 state responsibility, views of, 11, 59–​62, 77 political cosmopolitanism, 63–​64, 243 political rights democratic (see democracy/​democratic participation) global governance institutions’ protection of, 140 global integration of (see global political integration)

[ 288 ] Index

popular resource sovereignty and, 47–​48,  53 state responsibility and, 62–​64, 66, 71–​78 pooling sovereignty, 72–​77, 151–152 Popper, Karl, 219 popular resource sovereignty beneficent despotism and, 49–​53 capacity to manage resources with,  45–​46 citizens’ vs. subnational peoples’ rights to, 31–​35 civil liberties and, 47–​48, 53 conditions for regime’s authorization to manage, 45–​48, 53–​54 constitutional and legal principles supporting, 27–​30, 35–​44,  56–​57 definitions and semantics of, 36–​38 democracy and, 11, 23–​25, 34–​35, 48,  55–​58 elite self-​interest hampering, 29–​30 environmental regulations, compatibility with, 40–​41 fiduciary regime’s responsibilities for,  41–​44 human rights covenants on, 11, 26–27, 30–​31, 35, 39, 40 hypothetical approval to manage,  49–​53 international system design constraints on, 29, 33–​35 international system improvements affecting,  54–​58 jurisdiction and, 36–​37, 40–41 justice-​related qualifications on, 41 meaning of not settled, 29 oil and gas resources challenges of, 11, 24, 27–​29, 37, 38, 45–46, 48, 49–​54,  57 overview, 11, 23–​25 political rights and, 47–​48, 53 principal-​director relationship with, 42 private ownership and, 39–​41 property rights and, 37–​38, 41 reforms improving, 54–​58 resource curse of authoritarianism hindering, 24–​25,  55–​57

9 8 2

self-​determination and, 25–26, 30,  57–​58 trade policies in relation to, 29n18, 55, 58 transnational coordinative capacity supporting, 55, 58 trust model of, 42–​43 Westphalian sovereignty vs., 23,  56–​58 populism, 67, 73, 75 Posner, Eric, 113 posthumanism, 258, 275–​276 poverty. See also subsistence global governance institutions addressing, 109 moral cosmopolitanism and, 5 municipal cosmopolitan governance addressing, 191–​192, 197, 201– 203, 207–​208, 210 popular resource sovereignty and reduction of, 35, 55 state responsibility to address, 61, 67 power decision-​making, cessation of state responsibility for, 72–​75, 77 democratic constituency based on, 164–​166nn27–​28 popular resource sovereignty empowerment of people, 25–​27 Primed, 212 ProAntioquia, 209 progressive cosmopolitanism, 252 property rights international organizations’ democratic quality related to, 162, 179–​180 mutual vulnerability in, 248 popular resource sovereignty and, 37–​38,  41 Proyectos Urbanos Integrales (PUI), 206, 212–213 Qatar, popular resource sovereignty lack in, 54 radical moral egalitarianism, 264 Rawls, John, 237–​238, 243, 246–​248 Raz, Joseph, 146 Reagan, Ronald, 27

Red Cultural del Barrio Moravia, 215 refugees, 166n28, 241, 241n29. See also immigration; statelessness republican theory on domestic cosmopolitan constitutions, 12, 80–​81, 87–​99,  102 Kant on, 80–​81, 87–​90, 267–​268 on state responsibility, 12, 73–​77 on world state, 238–​239, 243–​244 resources Global Resource Dividend, 41 for international organizations, importance of, 183–​184 municipal cosmopolitan governance redistribution of, 196, 204, 206–​207,  209 oil and gas (see oil and gas) resource nationalism, 40 sovereignty over, 37–​39 (see also popular resource sovereignty) Restrepo, Camilo, 208 Ronzoni, Miriam, 76 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 76 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 41, 44 Rudd, Kevin, 28 Russia popular resource sovereignty lack in, 54–55 state responsibility stance of, 69 sanctuary cities, 189 Saudi Arabia human rights covenants rejection in, 30 popular resource sovereignty lack in, 24, 49–54 Schumpeter, Joseph, 161 second cosmopolitanism, 18, 254–​255, 257, 265–​269 self-​determination domestic cosmopolitan constitutions supporting, 80, 85, 87–​88, 92 human rights covenants on, 26, 30 popular resource sovereignty and, 25, 26, 30, 57–​58 state responsibility and, 76 world state’s collective, 17–​18, 233–​ 237, 239–​240, 242–​252

Index  [ 289 ]

0 9 2

Sen, Amartya, 23 Seneca, 263, 269 Shapcott, Richard, 79 Shell (oil company), 27, 38 Shue, Henry, 83 Singer, Peter, 5 skepticism collective self-​determination claims and, 236 international moral, 3 Medellín citizens' reaction to claims of model transformation, 211 Smith, Peter, 43–​44 social contracts, 81–​​96 Sociedad de Mejoras Publicas de Medellín, 203 solidarity, 163–​164, 237 South Africa, popular sovereignty in, 56 South Korea, popular resource sovereignty in, 39 sovereignty cosmopolitanism overview and, 11–​13 domestic cosmopolitan constitutions and, 12–​13,  79–​104 internal and external, balance of,  72–​73 pooling, 72–​75, 77, 151, 152 popular resource, 11, 23–​58 state responsibility and, 11–​12, 59–​78, 120–​121 Westphalian, 23, 56–​58, 107 world state vs., 236, 241, 252 space cosmopolitanism and geography of, 256–​262, 262f, 269, 273–​274 spatialized citizenship, in Medellín, 207–​209 Spain Pheasant Island shared sovereignty of, 36 subnational peoples in, 33 statelessness, 32, 32n26, 70–​71, 95 state responsibility capacity as foundation of, 66–​68 causal responsibility and liability as foundation of, 68 cession of decision-​making power as, 72–​75,  77 for climate change response, 12, 61, 62, 67, 72, 74–​76, 120–​121

[ 290 ] Index

definition of, 67–​68 dual approach to global state responsibility,  70–​71 duty to govern as, 71–​74 for economic issues response, 61–​62, 66–​67, 72, 74, 76–​77 global interests served via, 12, 62–​78 good international citizen concept underlying, 12, 64, 68–​69 for human rights support, 65, 69 impartiality and, 59, 61–​62, 63n13, 76, 77 internal and external sovereignty balance for, 72–​73 legitimacy of, 73, 77 moral cosmopolitanism and, 59–​65,  68–​71 national-​global marriage as structure for,  65–​67 national nepotism vs. neutrality and, 59–​62,  77 for nuclear weapons control, 12, 61, 62, 67, 72, 74–75 to outsiders, 12, 64, 69 overview, 11–​12, 59–​64,  77–​78 to own population, 12, 64, 69, 71–​77 political agency and, 62–​64, 66, 75, 78 political cosmopolitanism and, 63–​64 political responsibility as, 71–​77 for poverty response, 61, 67 republican theory on, 12, 73–​77 responsibility to protect doctrine for, 12,  69–​70 states authority of, 108–​109 constitutions of (see constitutions) definition and core features of, 107–​109 domestic biases of, 143–​144 globalizing democracy and redrawing boundaries of, 34–​35 jurisdiction of, 108 responsibility of, 11–​12, 59–​78, 120–​121 sovereignty of (see sovereignty) statelessness of people, 32, 95 statism toward, 3, 40 statism, 3, 40, 234, 235n7, 239, 246, 252 Stevenson, Hayley, 125 Stilz, Anna, 240

1 9 2

Stoic cosmopolitanism, 18, 254–​255, 258, 262–​265, 276 subsistence, 135, 140–142, 162, 241 Sudan/​South Sudan, popular resource sovereignty in, 24, 42 suprastate institutions. See global governance institutions Switzerland, electoral and governance systems in, 227–​229 Syria economic growth in, 50–​51 resource curse in, 25, 55 System of Central American Integration (SICA), 148 Tanzania, subnational peoples in, 32 taxes/​taxation, 76, 207 Taylor, Charles, 45 terrapolitan system, 18, 257, 261–​262, 262f, 270–​276 thick cosmopolitanism, 81, 92 third cosmopolitanism, 18, 254–​257, 269–​276 trade cosmopolitan morality influencing approach to, 4 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 170–​172, 179 global governance institutions on, 115, 123, 133, 146, 148 international organizations related to, 157, 170–​173, 176, 179, 180–​ 181, 184 (see also World Trade Organization) Mercosur, 24, 148 North American Free Trade Agreement, 24, 148, 172 popular resource sovereignty in relation to, 29n18, 55, 58 Trade-​Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), 157 transhumanism, 258, 275 transnational coordinative capacity, 55, 58 transparency of global governance institutions, 135–​136,  147 international organizations encouraging, 173–​174 of municipal cosmopolitan governance, 192

Tuan, Yi-​Tu, 260 Tully, James, 195 Tunisia, economic growth in, 50 Tuvalu, human rights covenants rejection in, 30 United Arab Emirates municipal development in, 207 popular resource sovereignty lack in, 54 United Kingdom European Union exit of, 16n37, 132, 147 popular resource sovereignty in, 37–38 subnational peoples in, 31–​33 United Nations (UN) Charter, 23, 26, 150 Commission on Human Rights, 148 Convention Against Torture, 175 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, 175 Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 175 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 26, 33, 175 Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 26, 141 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, 183 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 245 decolonization role of, 183 Framework Convention on Climate Change, 115, 125 General Assembly compliance mechanisms of, 133 structure of, 115–​116, 151–​152 High Commissioner for Refugees, 166n28, 241n29 Human Rights Committee, 26 Human Rights Council, 149n63 human rights covenants of, 11, 23, 26, 30–​31, 39–40, 103, 141, 148 international organization power of, 15 Security Council, 55, 133, 182 UN-​Habitat’s World Urban Forum, 199 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 23, 26, 39, 103, 141

Index  [ 291 ]

2 9

United States Bill of Rights, 103 climate change policies, 124 Medellín governance and, 197, 203, 207, 210 municipal development in, 207 popular resource sovereignty in, 27, 36–​40, 41, 45 republican federalism in, 75 states within, 32 subnational peoples in, 33 trade policies, 24, 148, 172, 179, 242–​243 universality, cosmopolitanism defined by, 3, 260 universities, in Medellín, 203, 206, 213 urbanism, 193. See also municipal cosmopolitan governance Urban Land Institute (ULI) “Innovative City of the Year” award, 198, 199 Uruguay, international organization-​ supported initiatives in, 172 Van Parijs, Philippe, 113–​114, 216 Venezuela, popular resource sovereignty in, 29, 39 Vernon, Richard, 97, 101 Victor, David, 126 Vietnam international trade organizations in, 179 popular resource sovereignty in, 28 Vreeland, James, 172 Walzer, Michael, 51–52, 82, 236 Weber, Max, 107–​108 Weinstock, Daniel, 250 Wenar, Leif, 23, 93 Westphalian sovereignty, 23, 56–​58, 107 World Bank democracy effect of, 15 domination of, 238 as international organization, 157n8, 170–​171, 176–​177,  184 legitimacy of, 133 world government authority of, 240–​242

[ 292 ] Index

cosmopolitan justice support in, 17, 232–​235, 237–​252 decolonization support in, 245 democratic arguments against, 235–​239 democratic principles and values of, 17, 233–​235, 239–​252 economic issues for, 243–​244 effectiveness of, 241–​242 global justice and, 232, 234–235, 240–​ 241, 243, 246–​251 institutional cosmopolitanism and, 17–​18, 232–​252 interdependence in, 247–​248 Law of Peoples and, 237–​245 legitimacy of, 237–​245 moral reciprocal agency in, 235, 247–​249,  251 mutual vulnerability in, 247–​249 nondomination principles for, 238–​ 239, 243, 244 overview, 17–​18, 232–​235, 251–​252 political virtues cultivated in, 246–​251 representativeness of, 241–​242 republican theory on, 238–​239, 243–​244 self-​determination and, 17–​18, 233– 237, 239–​240, 242–​252 sovereignty vs., 236, 241, 252 transition to, 251–​252 World Trade Organization (WTO) compliance mechanisms of, 133, 242–​243 democracy effect of, 15 as global governance institution, 115, 133, 146, 176 individual duties for activism prompting changes in, 146 as international organization, 157, 170–​173, 179, 180–​181, 184 legitimacy of, 133 Yo Te Cuento, 214 Young, Iris Marion, 242 Ypi, Lea, 85, 103, 191, 233 Zambia, popular resource sovereignty in, 39,  43–​44