Cosmopolitanism – Not a ‘major ideology’,but still an ideology

Introduction

Today the idea of cosmopolitanism has become widely accepted as an appropriate answer to what we now call globalization, and in the most recent edition of Blackwell’s Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy it is ranked at the level of ‘major ideologies’ together with liberalism, socialism and conservatism. This status I would like to contest, arguing that cosmopolitanism cannot suffice as a major ideology in this sense, and the reason is that it is already an ideology in another sense, namely in the classical Enlightenment and Marxist sense.

The point of departure is therefore a presentation of contemporary cosmopolitanism. Very often in discussions of cosmopolitanism, however, reference is made to Immanuel Kant and especially the section on the Recht of the world citizen in his small booklet Toward Perpetual Peace, first edition published in 1795, second already in 1796. I therefore discuss this idea as it was originally thought of by Kant. Here I argue that there is a tension in Kant’s argument between the rather demanding ideal of a humanity unified in peaceful cooperation and a more limited, but universal right to visit other people and places.

Continuing in the spirit of Kant’s universalist ideals, I then argue that the argument for claiming a cosmopolitan right or law by itself is ideological in the sense just mentioned and thus fundamentally flawed. This I argue by taking a hint from Kant to scrutinize the material implications of cosmopolitanism a bit more than most contemporary cosmopolitans would have it. With the help of two social theorists, Ulrich Beck and Zygmunt Bauman, I emphasize that the idea of cosmopolitanism favours the wanderer, the trader, the tourist, the one travelling business class, the one who enjoys the fruits of the world, whereas those having to stay back producing those fruits are simply considered providers of provisions along the way.

The idea of cosmopolitanism as a cosmopolitan law and right can thus be said to function an ideology in the second of the senses just mentioned: it presents itself as a universal law specifying the human right to free movement, but it functions as a cover-up for the dynamics of free market capitalist economy. As Elie Halévy argues, mobility can be said to be a necessary condition for capitalism, and to back up this claim I sketch his reconstruction of the economics of David Ricardo. Today one result of this material dynamic is the allocation of personal privileges to a global travelling elite looking for pleasure or business opportunities, or remedies to counter the effects of such activities.

This elite thus includes intellectuals like ourselves, occupied academically with global problems and their solutions, arguing intensely about how to save the world from all its ills. The idea of cosmopolitanism is therefore especially attractive to someone like us, i.e. academics presenting our work at seminars and conferences all over the world. However, taking an ideology for granted might be considered a species of false consciousness, and as Arthur Koestler reminds us in his novel The Call-Girls, in spite of the worthy goals, our efforts also have some ridiculous traits. ¹ All in all this should make us consider, whether there might not be better ways of thinking the ideals of a global political order than mainstream cosmopolitanism.

In this article it is thus argued that cosmopolitanism typically does not take into account the material logic of capitalism. Kant becomes a target of such a critique, since he, as Jürgen Habermas has reminded us, does not show any awareness of the disintegrating forces of capitalism. Even though Kant tries to be modest in his claims about the law of the world citizen, I will argue that cosmopolitanism in this sense, i.e. emphasizing the cosmopolitan right to free movement in isolation, is at risk of undermining ideologically Kant’s overall goal, namely perpetual peace. However, this critique of cosmopolitanism as an ideology does not in itself undermine the credibility of Kant’s peace project. First, in contrast to Otfried Höffe and Pauline Kleingeld I thus argue that Kant should not be considered a cosmopolitan at all. Second, for Kant the law of the world citizen was from the beginning thought of as subordinated to the political aim of achieving perpetual peace, and Kant must be credited for reconstructing the idea of international law accordingly.

Instead of cosmopolitanism we must develop a way of thinking politically and legally on a global scale that focuses less on guaranteeing the personal freedom of the individual human being as such and instead emphasizes political equality, continuity and social stability as preconditions for realizing republican freedom as political participation. As I have argued elsewhere, this must imply thinking politically in terms of both democracy and justice. ² Taking Kant seriously as a political philosopher thus means considering his political and legal project for perpetual peace in its totality, and actually I think his project is balanced conceptually in the way just suggested. The critical argument in this article therefore has to be followed up by an affirmative reconstruction of the political logic of Kant’s peace project, in particular scrutinizing the implications of combining republicanism, federalism and cosmopolitanism, or to be more precise, state law, law of the people and law of the world citizen. My overall project thus includes developing the idea of a democracy beyond the state, an idea I have discussed preliminarily elsewhere. ³ In this article I will limit myself to criticizing the idea of cosmopolitanism as a major political ideology.

First I thus take a brief look at some contemporary versions of cosmopolitanism (I). Since Kant is a key reference I ask what he has to say about the matter. It turns out that Kant does not speak of cosmopolitanism as a programme or an ideology. His focus is on the Recht of the world citizen, which is normally translated to the cosmopolitan right or law. Apparently the law or right of the world citizen is limited to a right to visit, but things gets complicated, since it turns out that Kant himself must be implying something more than just this very modest claim (II). Following Kant we must further take a closer look at the material aspect of cosmopolitanism thus conceived, i.e. the economy of travelling (III), and in this perspective it appears that cosmopolitanism can function as an ideology for letting possible investors look for business cases, that is, for promising places for capitalist exploitation (IV).

As an answer to such strong material processes cosmopolitanism is thus at best insufficient, both as a moral imperative and as a stipulated right. What we need is a more comprehensive political and legal perspective and the solutions this might indicate (V). To get inspiration for this, however, we can turn to Kant again. For Kant the overall goal is not cosmopolitanism, nor a cosmopolitan law or right, but perpetual peace, and to this goal the law, or right, of the world citizen represents only one subordinate element. The global political order must develop republics into federations in the hope of realizing a universal republic. For Kant this is the only way to secure perpetual peace, and this I find a promising lead for future work. As an answer to globalization we should thus drop the discussion of cosmopolitanism and follow Kant in his ambition of a threefold political constitution comprising state law, law of the people and law of the world citizen (VI).

I Modern cosmopolitanism is a moral position

During the last decades people all over the world have made cosmopolitanism their normative answer to the ever more accelerating globalization, and the literature is therefore enormous. Originally the idea of cosmopolitanism expressed the idea of being a citizen in the global city, and thus conceived the ideal can be traced back to Hellenistic philosophers in the empire of Alexander the Great, in particular the Cynics and the Stoics. Taking seriously the core meaning of the two elements of the word, the cosmopolitan is a person living in a city – polis – which comprises the whole universe – kosmos. A cosmopolitan is a person who feels at home, wherever he or she is in the global city. Reflecting the societal conditions of that time, i.e. the change from democratic city states to autocratic empires, the original cosmopolitanism was a moral rather than a political idea. Since then, the idea of cosmopolitanism has been revived from time to time in various versions, some of which can be called cultural, others ethical, legal, or political, and again others economic. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, however, most commonly cosmopolitanism is still a moral position. ⁴

The moral conception of being a citizen of the world means that one does not have to recognize the authority of any particular state or border. Being liberated from political commitments and responsibilities, however, means that no nation or culture has to have normative priority, and that every single human being has the same value, no matter their culture, nationality, sex, or race. As Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown argue in the said Encyclopedia, such a position can be met with objections concerning either the possibility of its realization, or the desirability, or both, ⁵ and this will be reflected in the discussions below.

One of the most prominent contemporary proponents of cosmopolitanism is Thomas Pogge, and it is also in his hands that cosmopolitanism becomes a ‘major ideology’. ⁶ When it comes to the basic idea of cosmopolitanism, for Pogge ‘persons are called cosmopolitans, or cosmopolitan, when they are understanding and respectful of foreign cultures, travel widely, and can interact well with people from many societies’. ⁷ As such, cosmopolitanism is a normative programme committed to supporting such people and their general attitude. Pogge considers three elements constitutive for ‘all cosmopolitan positions’, namely individuality, universality and generality. The ultimate units of concern are thus individual human beings, not groups, just as it is emphasized that this concern applies to ‘every living being equally’, and that it applies globally. Pogge himself argues for a ‘variant of moral cosmopolitanism that is formulated in terms of human rights’. ⁸

As a classical reader of utilitarianism, contract theory and in particular Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, Pogge does not initially emphasize the distinction between ethics and political philosophy. His point is that the world is characterized by ‘significant political and economic interdependencies’, and it is therefore reasonable to argue normatively for ‘global justice’. ⁹ This makes Pogge argue for a ‘moral universalism’ in relation to ‘social justice’, and this implies that ‘all persons’ are subjected to ‘the same system of fundamental moral principles’, that these principles ‘assign the same fundamental moral benefits (e.g. claims, liberties, powers, and immunities) and burdens (e.g. duties and liabilities) to all’, and that this is formulated in such ‘general terms so as not to privilege or disadvantage certain persons or groups arbitrarily’. ¹⁰

Pogge distinguishes between legal and moral cosmopolitanism, the latter being somehow ‘abstract’ and thus ‘weaker’, ¹¹ and in the textbook mentioned in the introduction he further refines the conception of cosmopolitanism by subdividing it into more subcategories and pursuing analytical distinctions. Instead of a moral cosmopolitanism we now have an ‘ethical’ cosmopolitanism, beside the legal cosmopolitanism there is a ‘social justice cosmopolitanism’, and finally there is a ‘monistic cosmopolitanism’, which can cover these variations as well as others. To Pogge any legal scheme, however, has to be based on some ‘moral criterion’, ¹² and this he discusses under the heading of social justice cosmopolitanism. This allows him to argue that ‘the infeasibility of a world state counts against legal cosmopolitanism, but not against social justice cosmopolitanism’. ¹³ For Pogge the point is that global justice therefore can be pursued independently of a world republic. When it comes to Pogge’s basic moral cosmopolitanism, impartiality is added as a distinguishing feature, ‘taking the human rights and socio-economic shares of all human beings symmetrically into account’. ¹⁴ However, as Pogge puts it:

Our world is very far from realizing human rights, as billions of people, mostly in the poorer countries, lack secure access to basic foodstuffs and safe water, to minimal clothing and shelter, to physical safety, basic education and healthcare, and to vital civil and political freedoms. The social justice cosmopolitanism I have sketched supports a critique of the status quo insofar as the massive human rights deficits it displays are institutionally avoidable. Social institutions are unjust insofar as they foreseeably contribute to an avoidable human rights deficit. ¹⁵

II Kant’s modest cosmopolitan right to hospitality implies something more

For Pogge cosmopolitanism can thus be considered a major ideology where the normative core is a set of universalist ethical and moral ideas, and according to Höffe one may say that cosmopolitanism in such a very general sense is the overall ideal of Kant’s philosophy. ¹⁸ Höffe thus traces the cosmopolitan perspective through all of Kant’s philosophy, that is, from his theory of knowledge over his ethics and philosophy of education to the philosophy of history and law. In a recent book on Kant and Cosmopolitanism Kleingeld also emphasizes the cosmopolitanism of Kant, although she limits the scope of the claim to Kant’s political philosophy and his philosophy of history. For Kleingeld, however, it is important to distinguish Kantian cosmopolitans from

…the stereotype of the individualistic citizens of nowhere, who relish their unattached and unencumbered existence, are self-satisfied with their self-styled identity, pick and choose cultural tidbits from many parts of the world, and regard the more rooted mortals around them with unmistakeable condescension. ¹⁹

Just as Pogge Kleingeld thus thinks of cosmopolitans as characterized by their openness to other peoples and cultures. For Pogge, however, cosmopolitanism in this sense is clearly connected to the practice of travelling, and this is also the case for Kant. In Toward Perpetual Peace Kant thus argues for the idea of a Recht of the world citizen, which can be claimed in relation to the practice of travelling. As Kleingeld emphasizes, the German word ‘Recht’ is very difficult to translate directly into only one English word. ²¹ Recht is somehow both about the law and the right of the world citizen, and it is this composite meaning which Kant refers to by a Latin phrase in parenthesis, i.e. ‘(ius cosmopoliticum)’. ²² There is no way to escape this ambiguity, and I will therefore actively make use of it in the interpretation of Kant’s argument, using both ‘law’ and ‘right’ as translations of ‘Recht’. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the intended possessor of a right in this sense clearly is somebody on the move. In spite of Kleingeld’s qualms concerning the superficiality of travelling, cosmopolitan law must therefore be connected to the necessities and ideals of visiting faraway places.

Kant states quite clearly that the cosmopolitan law must contain rights of every human being, but also that it must be something very modest. The suggestion is therefore to restrict cosmopolitan law to only general hospitality, and this Kant explains with the example of a person who must be granted the right to be treated peacefully, when he or she arrives at another person’s land. ²³ The basic law or right of a citizen of the world is thus that a stranger has the right to ask for permission to enter without being molested. As indicated, this is often conceived of as a right to hospitality, but if one takes the German expression employed by Kant seriously, then what is meant by ‘Besuchsrecht’ must be a law of visiting or a right to visit, i.e. not a right to hospitality in a more extended sense. The problem is thus, how to understand Kant’s idea of law or right of a world citizen more precisely.

To bring the problem more clearly to the fore, one can consider what happens, when this cosmopolitan law or right has been put into use and been respected. In other words, what is supposed to happen next? The point is that this is not quite clear. One interpretation might be that Kant’s answer is to silently strengthen the basic right to arrive safely to become a right to stay. He thus states that the one arriving can only be refused entry, if this can be done without destroying him. Such a reading of Kant gets its credibility by being supported by, for instance, Seyla Benhabib who finds the same wording in the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, ²⁴ and this is also the way Kleingeld reads Kant. ²⁵ According to this interpretation of Kant’s argument, if the life or security of the one arriving is threatened, then according to cosmopolitan law he or she cannot be refused to stay. This interpretation is also supported by the fact that Kant himself goes one step further, saying that as long as the visitor remains peacefully at his place, then it would be wrong to act towards him with hostility. ²⁶ That means that when first the stranger is arrived at our shore, it would be wrong to make him move away, as long as he remains in peace. Apparently the cosmopolitan right can thus be interpreted rather strongly, namely as a law, which implies the right to stay at anybody’s doorstep, as long as one pleases.

Kant, however, apparently does not see the problem. For Kant it seems that even if an extended stay becomes a visit, the person staying as a visitor does not become a guest. Even though one can stay, Kant thus explicitly states that the cosmopolitan right cannot be claimed as a right to be a guest, which according to Kant would mean that one becomes part of the household. The cosmopolitan right is only a right to visit, but as such this right is a universal right of all human beings. The point for Kant can be reconstructed as follows. As human beings we all live on the same globe, and we cannot spread ourselves indefinitely. Since we cannot say that one human being originally has more right to a part of the earth than another, then we must say that we – i.e. humankind – possess the earth in common. ²⁷ Kant would then say that since everybody has equal rights, there are good general reasons to strive for peaceful encounters.

At the level of universalist reasoning, that is a fair conclusion. Whether that constitutes a good reason in the subjective perspective of a particular rational individual in real life, however, is less certain. Restricting himself to the chosen line of reasoning, apparently Kant nevertheless thinks he can ignore this problem, which can be considered either as a matter of taking rights seriously, or as a variation of the free-rider problem. Ignoring this problem Kant can therefore continue the argument emphasizing that the communality of the earth is especially relevant for the surface, since it is on the surface that we human beings live and travel. As Kant notes, there is a limit as to how much distance we can maintain living on the same planet. ²⁸

The claim Kant wants to employ, however, is much stronger, namely that inhospitable people, who rob travellers or make them slaves, are acting ‘against the natural law’, and that this natural law must be understood as the right of the newly arrived to be able to interact peacefully with the original inhabitants. But whereas Kant with some right can deduce the communality of the earth as a matter of principle, the reason he states for why first encounters must be peaceful is explicitly teleological: only when the law of the world citizen is conceived of and respected as a natural law prohibiting robbing strangers, is it possible for distant parts of the world to enter into peaceful relations; only then can humanity as such be brought closer to realizing a cosmopolitan constitution. ²⁹ In other words a very narrow circle, especially considering the meaning of Recht: only when we presuppose the comprehensive ideal of cosmopolitan law, then we can demand that everybody should be entitled to the modest cosmopolitan right.

According to Kant – and to many of his interpreters – the law of the world citizen thus at least means that everybody possesses the universal right to approach and access a foreign nation, without having to fear repercussions. Two basic problems, however, follow immediately from this idea. The first I have already touched upon: what happens after one has been denied entry to the country in question? Can one stay indefinitely on another man’s doorstep? If the reasoning so far is correct, then Kant would find it difficult to deny the right to do this. After a while, however, the mere fact of someone staying at one’s doorstep becomes a problem, and Kant does not make it clear what would be the proper thing to do in such cases.

Two possible interpretations seem possible. As mentioned, one is to make Kant’s reasoning relevant for the right to asylum, but in his general perspective the mere staying might also be taken to overstep the limited right to visit, and in this second interpretation staying too long would simply be an aggression. Whatever is the case, Kant would certainly have it dealt with in ways proper for such events, namely according to law, but I am not sure what his answer would be to this problem. Actually, I suspect him to be not sufficiently clear at this point, and with good reason, since this problem reflects the conflict between universal human rights for individuals and the collective rights of a republican people.

This problem is connected to the second basic problem, namely if the ideal of cosmopolitanism should be restricted to only the very limited right to visit. Kant’s official position is that the law of the world citizen only allows us to claim the universal right to contact other people in peace, not to enter into more stable relationships with them. And of course one cannot unilaterally claim a right to be part of an alien household – i.e. a political community – or to impose oneself on other people, who do not want one’s company. But if cosmopolitan law is to be contributory to world peace, and that is clearly Kant’s idea, then the right of the world citizen must imply something more than just keeping the distance and respecting the inviolability of each other. The right just to approach each other peacefully is not enough to ensure world peace. We have to have some time to get acquainted with and to understand each other, so that we can go into conversations and discussion about how to rule common affairs, in particular the future of our planet. To interpret the right of the world citizen as a right to communication, as Oliver Eberl and Peter Niesen do, ³⁰ is therefore right to the point. Obtaining stable relations across state borders requires the development of the same kind of mutual trust and civic virtues which are needed within a republic for the establishment of social coherence and political government, and in both cases communication is necessary.

As it has been noted, Kant backs up his cosmopolitanism with both an anthropology and a philosophy of history. ³¹ Kant thus thinks that peoples gradually in their cultural development also will come closer in their ‘principles’, ³² and such a process must imply that they have some time to communicate and learn from each other. Therefore even the apparently very modest cosmopolitan right of Kant must somehow imply that we should not be refused entry, at least not right away. This is also indicated by Kant’s calling it a right to ‘visit’, since even a visit normally implies something more than just safe approach, arrival and immediate departure. Kant himself apparently also thinks of the right of a world citizen in this more extended sense, namely as a right that should allow us – and hopefully even entitle us – to enter and travel freely and safely in the territories we wish to visit, as long as we ourselves do not do any harm to our surroundings. The problem is, however, that this last condition might be most likely to be violated precisely by some of the people Kant thinks should benefit from cosmopolitan law in the first place, namely the people whose business is trade and investment.

III Travelling is the expense of accumulated surplus value

The cosmopolitan ideal to which Kant hopes to give sufficient normative support by his argument thus reveals itself to be much more demanding than what is officially stated and immediately implied by his very modest idea of a right as a world citizen under cosmopolitan law. Still, most people would find both the idea and the implications quite uncontroversial, but as illustrated in the discussion of Kant so far, it is not so easy to argue normatively for extending the right of the world citizen beyond the non-violability of the person and the right to knock on another’s door in peace. These difficulties become even more pronounced, if one takes into account the material implications of the cosmopolitan right thus conceived, and especially if one shifts the focus from refugees to travellers on business or pleasure.

Here we can follow the lead of Kant himself, who quite explicitly takes into consideration the material aspects of moving around the globe. Kant mentions ships and camels that take us to faraway places, and it is the risks connected to travelling in this way that he wants to limit. It was thus risky to be the traveller visiting, but there was also a risk connected to being visited, and Kant was very well aware of the risk by letting traders into one’s own country. Just as the cosmopolitan law is supposed to confer rights both to hosts and to visitors, it also imposes obligations on both. Just as Kant condemns those barbarians and Arab Bedouin nomads, who mistake the right to approach for the right to plunder, so he also condemns the injustice done by ‘civilized and especially merchant states from our part of the world’ ³³ to the countries and people they have visited. They have mistaken the right to visit for a right to conquest, and the result of the suppression of the inhabitants has been war, hunger and all kinds of material evils. Kant therefore considers the reaction of China and Japan to foreigners as well founded and wise. At the time of Kant China had thus restricted the right to access and entry to only one nationality, namely the Dutch, and Japan only granted foreigners a right to ‘access, not entry’. ³⁴

These discussions indicate quite clearly that in the normative argument for the law of the world citizen Kant finds it relevant to consider the economic preconditions, the economic intentions and the economic outcome of these movements of human beings on the surface of the globe. Taking this into account, in this section I want to argue that cosmopolitanism is ideological in the classical Enlightenment sense of the expression. As Marx remarked, the ruling ideas are always ideas of the rulers, and this is relevant to point out no matter what kind of Empire we are subjected to. When it is forgotten that the ruling normative ideas might have an origin that shows them precisely to be just ideas of the rulers; when it is forgotten that it is in the interest of every potential ruler to present his ideas as in the societal interest of all citizens, and that such ideas therefore might not be valid and beneficial for everybody; then such ideas become ideological, and a critique of a set of such ideas can thus be called ‘critique of ideology’. ³⁵ Marx opposed ideology in this sense to science and thus to truth, whereas, for instance, Lenin thought of both communism and bourgeois ways of thinking as just different kinds of ideology. ³⁶ According to Habermas this change happened due to Engels’ naturalized conception of ideology which Marx failed to criticize. ³⁷ Pogge thus thinks of cosmopolitanism as an ‘ideology’ in the Leninist sense, whereas I argue it to be ideological in the Marxist sense.

In another context, I have argued that Rawls’ Law of Peoples is ideological in this latter sense, since its categories tend to silence the importance of capitalism and power in relation to justice. ³⁸ Reasons for such worries can also be found in relation to Pogge’s position, although they point in a slightly different direction. Pogge thus criticizes Rawls for not recognizing the responsibilities of the rich countries and argues that the current global order is simply unjust in relation to well-founded principles of distributive justice such as those of Rawls. Emphasizing the practical aspects of the argument, Pogge wants his moral cosmopolitanism to be an ‘institutional’ position in contrast to an ‘interactional’. The former is in the political spirit of Rawls basically an argument for the creation of ‘institutional schemes’ for improving social justice, whereas the latter is an argument for imposing ‘constraint on conduct’. ³⁹ Pogge’s point is that we in the rich and powerful countries ‘share a collective responsibility for the justice of the existing global order’, since we have the power to change the ‘global institutional scheme’, which he believes to be ‘causally responsible for current deprivations’. ⁴⁰ For Pogge his ‘institutional cosmopolitanism’ ⁴¹ therefore has a bearing on how we should govern the world and thus on the idea of state sovereignty.

For Pogge legal cosmopolitanism is specifically associated with the idea of a world republic, and in contrast to most contemporary intellectuals Pogge does not dismiss the idea, but interprets it as reflected in the functioning constitutional orders of the USA and the EU. He mentions almost in passing that his plan ‘requires moderate centralization’ above ‘the state’, ⁴² but he also thinks that it will require decentralization of the state. Still, Pogge does not seem to be very interested in the dynamics of economy, which gives rise to, reproduces and increases social inequality, just as he apparently does not worry too much about how one should find someone who could safely be entrusted to carry out the very radical institutional reforms, which he proposes. In general he thus shows very little interest in both the dynamics of capitalism and the conceptual logic of democracy.

With reference to the late Iris Marion Young, Rainer Forst has distinguished between two paradigms of justice. ⁴³ The first thinks of justice in relation to the factors responsible for the production of injustice, whereas the second conceptualizes justice within the paradigm of distribution. In the latter case that typically means ignoring the normative significance of economy and politics, i.e. of production and power, and here Pogge seems to be a prime example.

Even more worrying, however, is when one considers possible political implications of this ignorance. As it has been pointed out, ⁴⁴ in spite of the proclaimed individualism the ideal of cosmopolitanism can be exaggerated normatively and thus function as an ideology for an authoritarian or even a totalitarian government. Again, Pogge seems to be an example. As Mikkel Thorup has emphasized, cosmopolitanism can make war and military interventions legitimate or even ‘morally required’. ⁴⁵ As I have argued in the paper just referred to, this is a problem for Rawls, even without the universalist implications of cosmopolitanism, and I also suspect it to be a problem for Pogge’s cosmopolitanism. For these political reasons alone, it is important to criticize his idea of cosmopolitanism as a major ideology.

In this context, however, I will emphasize the economic critique. In the terminology of Kleingeld and Brown, one can say that Pogge’s moral and political cosmopolitanism supports an economic cosmopolitanism, ⁴⁶ which has a lot of well-known undesirable consequences. I want to claim, however, that even Kant’s more limited conception of a cosmopolitan law, which is often interpreted as a harmless candidate for a modest, but still universally valid, law for humankind as such, is also worth contesting because of similar ideological implications. The point is that within the current social reality – i.e. capitalism – one could argue that precisely this apparently modest idea of cosmopolitanism functions as an ideological back-up for those already privileged by the present societal conditions, i.e. those with means of earning money and accumulating capital. As I argued above, although people favourable to cosmopolitanism like Kleingeld have tried to distance Kantian cosmopolitans from the global travelling elite, Kant himself introduces his conceptual innovation of a specifically cosmopolitan law and right precisely with reference to the needs of merchant travellers.

In such a perspective, I will argue, cosmopolitanism cannot be acceptable as a major ideology, which can serve humankind as a general normative ideal, neither as a comprehensive doctrine, nor as a political programme. Rather it must be considered as a part of a major ideology in Marx’ sense. The claim is thus that the normative back-up of cosmopolitanism functions as a cover-up for the societal dynamics that produces and reproduces the existing injustices. As it is formulated in the Philosophical Dictionary of the bygone German Democratic Republic, cosmopolitanism originally was ‘an ideological expression of the interests of the rising bourgeoisie’ criticizing feudalist ‘provincionalism’. Today – that is, in 1974 – it is ‘reactionary’, serving the ‘justification of the international association of monopolized capital’. As such it represents ‘the reactionary move against socialist internationalism’. ⁴⁷

These are serious, but also somehow archaic, accusations. Thus, in relation to today’s philosophical commonplaces they appear as ‘radical’, ⁴⁸ and as such to require further argumentation. The point to be made, however, is actually quite simple, namely that one should as always ‘follow the money’, or, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’, as it was put in the heartland of the Empire just a few years ago. To move is to consume energy, to travel is to spend resources accumulated beforehand, and that means that there is an economy of the practices that serve as models for cosmopolitanism.

Here it is helpful to take a look at the way Beck presents his ‘cosmopolitan view’. To Beck cosmopolitanism is precisely an answer to globalization; as he says, ‘reality itself has turned cosmopolitan’. ⁴⁹ The cosmopolitan view reflects the experience of crises in ‘the global society’, the differences and conflict in this society, the increased global perspective, the impossibility of living without frontiers, and the principle of ‘mixture’. ⁵⁰ Beck’s idea is that globalization is at the same time a multidimensional ‘cosmopolitanization’, ⁵¹ which is reflected by the global anti-globalization movement as well as the United Nations and all kinds of other transnational phenomena. Whereas cosmopolitanism to Kant implies an active ‘task’ of ‘ordering the world', cosmopolitanization is something that ‘happens’, something ‘passive uncontrolled’, ⁵² an ‘irreversible’ ⁵³ process, reflecting a ‘global risk society’. ⁵⁴

This cosmopolitan view makes Beck contrast the normative philosophical cosmopolitanism with an empirical cosmopolitanism, a ‘cosmopolitanism of reality’. ⁵⁵ Instead of a cosmopolitan idealism he proposes a ‘realist cosmopolitanism’ reflecting a ‘cosmopolitan reality’. ⁵⁶ In this view he notes certain cosmopolitan ‘dispositions and practices’ such as an extensive mobility, where people have the possibility to travel ‘in reality as well as imaginary and virtually’. This goes together with a capacity to ‘consume’ many places and surroundings, a curiosity for other places, people and cultures, as well as a capacity to structure them ‘historically, geographically and anthropologically’. ⁵⁷ Finally one can also note a capacity to map all such experiences, as well as a capacity to distinguish aesthetically between various places, natures and societies, and an openness towards other persons and cultures, which is connected to a disposition to experience other cultures and languages as ‘enriching’. ⁵⁸

Just as it is the case for Pogge in relation to cosmopolitanism, for Beck the idea of cosmopolitanization is closely related to the practice of travelling. For Beck the travellers include those on business class such as the representatives of capital and state, but also those who travel more modestly as in the case of ‘the actors of non-state sub-politics’, who aim to affect ‘the global public opinion’, ⁵⁹ i.e. ecologists, feminists, human rights activists, union organizers, intellectuals at large, and finally also those who move in even more humble manners such as refugees and illegal immigrants. Whereas travelling in the early modern days of Kant was still a rather exotic enterprise for merchants, missionaries and adventurous scientists like Alexander von Humboldt, whose journey to Latin America entertained the western bourgeoisie for years, ⁶⁰ the globalization of our times – which is often called post- or late modernity – is characterized by a constantly increasing frequency and intensity of travelling, interaction and communication all over the world.

In the book Globalization from 1998 Bauman describes various aspects of this development, calling special attention to the relation between those who travel and those who stay, between the global mobility and the local immobility. One point that Bauman in particular emphasizes is the increased number of tourists. Where early-modern society was a society determined to a large extent by production, late-modern society can be labelled a consumer society. ⁶¹ Tourists are consumers, they simply spend their leisure time, expressing the logic of the consumer society by realizing the wealth accumulated from the past and supplied by the constant transfer of surplus value from the faraway places, where production takes place today. Tourists can be thought of as relatively innocent, but they expose the inequality between those having to work and those who can simply let life pass by. ⁶²

The modern tourists are protected by the local authorities against the threats resulting from perceived social inequality, because they represent an income for society as such, and this is even more the case when we are talking about what we can call the travellers. In contrast to tourists travellers can be said to have a purpose beyond leisure, and as we have seen, it was the latter kind of visitors Kant had in mind, when he argued to make visiting a universal right. The remarks on the material logic of tourism, however, indicate that merely looking at other people also has material aspects worth considering. Neither the tourists, nor the adventurous or idealist scientists, are innocent in this sense, and that is even less the case with business travellers.

IV Cosmopolitanism is an ideology for capitalist exploitation

The law of world citizenship is about communication, i.e. encouraging encounters that help the transmission of enlightened principles across borders. For Kant the most reliable force to bring people together across state borders is the spirit of commerce. The traditional travellers were nomads or traders, who carried their goods with them, and they were constantly at risk of losing their fortune or even their life. As we saw above, it was the journey of such travellers Kant wanted to secure. Kant was convinced that the expansion of trade relations was an important factor in the process to achieve perpetual peace, and that is no doubt the reason behind his concern for the cosmopolitan merchants. The traditional argument would be that stable profit is most likely to be obtained in peaceful surroundings. Peace means that things are predictable, typically that there is law and order. Law and order mean that one can make reliable arrangements, agreements and contracts backed up by the authorities. Only on such condition can we make reliable calculations of consequences and set up long-term business relations. The problem with social instability is that there are too many factors, which are unpredictable. As Kant has famously said about ‘the spirit of commerce’: it ‘cannot coexist with war’. ⁶³

Thus for Kant ‘through the mechanism of the human drives nature guarantees perpetual peace’; ⁶⁴ when nature wants something that is beyond human will, ‘it does it itself’. ⁶⁵ This is Kant’s answer to those who say that the ‘will of reason’ in ‘praxis’ is not powerful enough in relation to the ‘selfish dispositions’ of human beings. Because here it is precisely these dispositions that come ‘to help’. ⁶⁶ To Kant the point is that these dispositions work against each other in their individual manifestations, but together they constitute a ‘mechanism of nature’, which is turned into a ‘means’ for ‘reason’. ⁶⁷ This is the idea of the invisible hand made famous by Adam Smith, and Kant thus accepts the logic of the free market, as it was reconstructed by classical political economy. To use another famous image, this one stemming from Hegel, Kant obviously considers it an example of the fortuitous dynamics of reason realizing itself behind our backs. Kant admits that the ‘security’ thus offered might not hold from a theoretical point of view, but for ‘practical purposes’ it is enough to constitute a ‘duty’. ⁶⁸

Kant had in general a great confidence in the purposiveness, functional strength and power of nature as it is. This is not as clearly the case, when it comes to society. In Toward Perpetual Peace Kant wanted to change society, but as Habermas notes, still Kant had not learned enough about the powerful material logic of capitalist society, neither in terms of class oppositions and aggressive imperialist foreign politics, ⁶⁹ nor, I would add, when it came to the basic logic of the accumulation and independence of capital. The problem is that capitalism does not work in the rational manner, Kant thinks it does. As I have discussed in another context, the dynamics of capitalism depends to a much larger degree on the willingness to take chances. ⁷⁰ Equilibrium and predictability might be the goal of the system in the universal functional perspective, but for the individual economic actor fortunes are made only when business opportunities occur in times of instability. Wars and social unrest do not only create economic loses; like in most other games, when one is losing, another is winning. Societal instability is thus the condition, on which enormous fortunes can be created. This is where we find the biggest windows of opportunity.

The social phenomenological logic of globalization described by Bauman reflects a basic material logic, namely the logic of the free market and capitalist economy. Globalization is economically speaking just capitalism at an advanced stage, and already in the 19^th century Ricardo argued that a well-functioning capitalist economy presupposes the full development of the logic of the free market. And, as Halévy made remarkably clear already by the end of the same century, what is crucial according to Ricardo is precisely mobility.

In the general perspective of political economy a market will, as Halevý explains, always experience changes in the market prices. In order to avoid that these natural fluctuations develop from an imperfect market situation into a crisis, liberal political economy argues that it is necessary that all commodities can be moved without friction, and this includes the individual human beings, ‘the atoms of the economic world’. The functional logic of a system striving towards general equilibrium requires all the commodified individuals, the producers and consumers, to be ‘absolutely mobile’, ⁷¹ just as they must be capable of recognizing their economic interests and act accordingly. The biggest obstacles for the optimization of the free market to a general equilibrium are thus the immobility of goods, capital and labour. One such obstacle is the economic investment in material goods, which can only with difficulties be moved or sold. Another obstacle is the emotional engagement of individuals, namely that the individuals value their present nation and have feelings of belonging to their own neighbourhood, which result in a ‘natural resistance’ ⁷² against leaving the localities of one’s own country.

The resistance from local patriotism can be overcome in various ways, some of which are more humane than others. We know very well the brutal ways of creating refugees from ethnic, religious, or political cleansing. In this context, however, the focus is on the production of inequality and poverty, which creates refugees by motivating people to become instrumentally rational, leaving all other concerns aside but survival and material welfare. The other side of this motivation – i.e. the carrot – is thus the desire for a good life, which can motivate even without the threats implied by persecution, poverty, or misery in general. And this desire can be more or less cultivated, more or less articulate in its expression, depending on level of class, culture, education, etc. The basic point is that increased mobility is the condition realizing the free market, and that means that we should not just expect more tourists and travellers; globalization will also imply more refugees and immigrants. And the point is that a refugee not only has to leave a place, he or she also arrives at another place, and in these other places the immigrants may form a real threat to the livelihood of those already living there. That makes it obvious that the increased mobility is not innocent at all, which is precisely what Kant calls attention to.

It is the idealization of mobility that brings capitalist economy in conflict with traditional economy, since the latter precisely is based on the immobility of real people and real property. Capitalist economy will only invest resources in production facilities such as farms, mines and even industrial plants, if the economic value invested can easily be withdrawn, converted into money and transferred quickly into the global financial markets. The economy of the free market is, in the words of Halévy, ‘infinitely mobile, without any local attachment and always ready to transfer its capital, at a moment’s notice, from one part of the world to the other’. ⁷³ And when the capital moves, the people have to move too, since it is the logic of private property and the capital to gradually absorb all other sources of wealth, including human work power. Creating migration is simply an effect of the material logic of free market capitalist economy. Those refugees and illegal immigrants who try their luck coming to Europe and the USA have simply overcome their ‘natural resistance’ against leaving their homes. Like the classical Marxist Proletariat they have realized that they had nothing to lose but their chains.

Halévy’s very precise formulation of the material logic of the free market and the capitalist economy was phrased more than a century ago. It is this conceptual logic that Ricardo so impressively had reconstructed theoretically from the writings of above all Adam Smith, and that we today can experience being realized in the real world, in real time. It is thus no wonder that Bauman in his analysis of globalization again and again returns to the phenomenon of mobility. What is striking is that the speed of the electronic signals has almost reduced the time needed to transfer economic value to zero, annihilating the limitations of space and suspending ‘the law of gravity’. ⁷⁴

In this sense it is quite accurate to label globalization ‘late’ modernity or ‘late’ capitalism. The point is that we seem very close to realizing those material, technical and logical conditions, which free market capitalist economy as a system demands to function optimally. Absolute mobility is what is demanded to realize the general equilibrium, which is the ideal condition of free market capitalist economy. The result of such mobility might be the happy equilibrium predicted by the liberals, but personally I take that to be very improbable. Rather the result seems to be, as it was famously expressed by Marx, that ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life’. ⁷⁵

Today’s business travellers are investors, who as functionaries and prospectors for the liberated capital have to take decisions about where to place the capital for the next period of time. Of course capital must always be placed, where the accumulative growth is most likely to be the biggest. Since capital can easily be transferred by mobile electronic equipment connected to satellites, investors can look for profit all over the world, and since the transfer of capital can be made almost immediately, the opportunities for big profits created by extreme market disequilibrium – i.e. social instability and unrest – can now be exploited. War can create losses, but also enormous fortunes.

So Kant was wrong. War and commerce do not exclude each other, at least not in the technologically advanced late modernity. We can therefore neither assume that the spirit of commerce in itself can secure peace, nor that it will even contribute to peace. One can say that the spirit of commerce can only contribute to peace, if it is restricted and balanced by other spirits of human interaction like religion, morality, or politics. This was the logic behind classical political economy. And actually Kant would probably have to welcome such a proposal, since he often thinks of human beings in this dualistic and sometimes even antagonistic way. Famous, for instance, is the contrast in the Religion within the Limits of Reason from 1793–4 between the ‘Hang zum Bösen’, i.e. the propensity to evil of human beings, and their ‘Anlage zum Guten’, ⁷⁶ their predisposition to the good, and well known is also the idea of the ‘ungesellige Gesselligkeit’, ⁷⁷ i.e. the unsociable sociality from the 1784 Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective.

V Capitalism must be countered by politics and law, not just by morality and ethics

Living by the end of the 18^th century Kant was not able – or willing – to imagine the situation where capital is free to circulate in virtual space and thus free from any traditional restrictions. As Bauman reminds us, traditional nobility had their main values placed in real estate with all the responsibilities it meant, ⁷⁸ and that made them less mobile than the financial elite of capitalism. Today capital has become almost totally independent of the material resources generating economic value, and the business travellers typically do not carry goods, neither their own nor as representatives of the real owners. At our stage of capitalist and technological development we can think of the capital as almost liberated from its material dependency. The only material conditions are wireless global electronic networks connected to servers placed in faraway, cold and well-protected locations. Still, by invoking human desire capital can be transformed from a potential and imaginary power into a real living force, which in turn can be both nourished and put in motion at will and at particular places around the world.

Cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization means securing the traveller the right to free passage, and today that primarily amounts to letting business people have the possibility to judge, whether the place of visit is a good place to make an investment. It is all a matter of trust and confidence, since capital is almost immaterial. The safety of the traveller is an indication of the safety of the capital that an investor is hoped to leave behind when departing. The right to a peaceful access means that the traveller can come back to his trustees, who are securing the value exploited from the workforce at that particular place. Investment means exploitation, and vice versa. There is never one without the other, but the new thing is that investment can be withdrawn almost instantaneously.

The consequences of extending a basic moral cosmopolitanism to a cosmopolitan right to safe journey in general is that the functionaries of the capital today can travel around freely, make the whole world compete in attractiveness concerning where the capital should be placed for the next period, and then they have the right to come back and collect the profit. In this perspective it seems that even the apparently modest claims of the original Kantian right to free movement must be conceived of as a contribution to the liberalist ideology of capitalism, namely the ideological back-up of the material conditions of free trade, investment and thus exploitation.

In this perspective contemporary cosmopolitanism is an ideology that makes mobility possible for the global elite, who decide the destiny of the locals. These phenomena, however, should not come as a surprise. The logic of the free market is to transform everything valuable and desirable into commodities, which can be owned privately and therefore sold on the market. If it is recognized that human relations, political praxis and social life in general cannot without severe losses be reduced to exchange relations typical for a marketplace, then the continued liberation of free market and the development of unrestricted capitalism are a threat to humanity. Economic competition and exploitation are warfare with what is normally considered peaceful means; the consequences in the end, however, are just like in any other war. Exploitation means that people are materially harmed or even die, namely by lack of resources, most extremely, lack of food or clean water.

If I should sum up my argument so far, contemporary normative discussions of cosmopolitanism seem to indicate that it is an ideal with a relatively broad scope of reference, which can be subdivided into many categories. One therefore easily gets the impression that cosmopolitanism is very attractive as a general normative position, and that this is the position, which should be attributed to philosophers like Pogge and Kant. In this perspective the core of cosmopolitanism can be said to be a liberal programme to achieve global peace, harmony and justice by appealing either to the individual moral conscience or to universal human rights.

However, understood in this way cosmopolitanism suffers from all the major advantages and disadvantages typically attributed to liberalism. Here I have called attention to mainly one aspect, namely the way the cosmopolitan right to free access can function as ideological back-up for free market economy. The point is that cosmopolitanism acts in the service of mobility and thus in the interest of free market capitalist economy. The contradictory consequence, however, is that cosmopolitanism as an ideology contributes to legitimize dissolving all those public institutions, which could actually contribute to realizing the liberal programme of freedom, justice and peace, and because of the combined lack of understanding of economy and politics, the normative cry for global justice tends to become authoritarian, as the example of Pogge illustrates.

Cosmopolitanism therefore does not suffice as the overall normative answer to globalization. As it has been recognized by, for instance, Benhabib, there is a serious tension between liberalism and democracy, ⁷⁹ and this is also the case between cosmopolitanism and democracy. We need a political philosophy, which can constitute a political and legal answer to capitalism, and which is unconditional in its allegiance to democracy. In sketching such a project, however, we can once again refer to Kant. This might seem a bit strange, since Kant’s law of the world citizen has been denounced together with Pogge’s cosmopolitanism, but the point is that Kant is neither a cosmopolitan nor a proponent of cosmopolitanism. In this last reflection I will thus argue that it is wrong to categorize Kant’s thinking under the title cosmopolitanism.

VI For Kant perpetual peace is to be achieved by law and politics, not by universalist ethics

Most of the current Anglophone discussions on these issues are conducted in terms of cosmopolitanism, and in these discussions one often refers to Kant, for instance, in the way Pogge or Benhabib does. Of course, such selective readings cannot suffice as interpretations of Kant’s political philosophy, but the problem is that not even much more well-informed and scholarly documented interpretations of Kant’s writings will do in this context. The problem is, I will claim, that the categorization of Kant’s thinking under the heading of cosmopolitanism in itself is misleading.

Cosmopolitanism was from its very first conception a moral position. This is the way Pogge, Kleingeld and Brown understand it, and, as we shall see, this was also the way Kant conceived it. As mentioned, both Höffe and Kleingeld argue that cosmopolitanism is a suitable overall label for Kant’s thinking. As part of the argument Kleingeld emphasizes that the word ‘cosmopolitan’ was already in general use in German in Kant’s days, and as an example she mentions a book title from 1788, Das Geheimniβ des Kosmopoliten-Ordens. ⁸⁰ Still, I will claim that Höffe and Kleingeld are wrong in attributing cosmopolitanism to Kant. The fundamental problem with such an interpretation of Kant’s position is that it does not reflect the way Kant actually uses the term ‘cosmopolitan’. As already mentioned it seems a bit odd that Kleingeld attempts to liberate Kant’s alleged cosmopolitanism from the associations of travelling, since precisely when it comes to Kant, it is clear that the law of the world citizen is meant to take into account the interests and rights of individual travellers. However, whether or not cosmopolitans are fond of travelling, it still seems to me that cosmopolitanism is a misleading way to characterize Kant’s overall political project. The claim is thus that Kant is not a cosmopolitan at all, and this claim gets substance, when one takes a closer look at the relevant passages in Toward Perpetual Peace.

What is taken to be Kant’s cosmopolitanism is thus typically argued with reference to Kant’s discussion of the ‘Recht’ of a ‘world citizen’. ⁸¹ This of course makes Pogge categorize Kant’s position under what he calls ‘legal cosmopolitanism’, ⁸² but as indicated in section II above, for Kant the law or right of the world citizen means something much more specific, namely the basic right to hospitality, or to visit. This is at least the established opinion among the most well-recognized interpreters of Kant. Especially noteworthy in this context, however, is that the only literal warrant for the assumption of a general programme of cosmopolitanism in Toward Perpetual Peace is one single occurrence of the adjective ‘cosmopolitan’, namely in the Latin phrase referred to above, ‘ius cosmopoliticum’.

Instead Kant conducts these discussions using the term ‘Weltbürger’, i.e. world citizen. This was already the case in his Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan – that is, weltbürgerlicher – Perspective from 1784, just as he in the article on Enlightenment from the same year referred to a ‘society of world citizens’. ⁸³ Eberl and Niesen argue that one can distinguish between a broad and a narrow sense of ‘weltbürgerlich’, namely one that just indicates participation in a global public sphere and one that implies a global state-like order. ⁸⁴ They also claim that the term is still in flux in Kant’s discussion of the law of peoples in On the Old Saw: That May Be Right in Theory, but It Won’t Work in Practice from 1793. ⁸⁵ Still, they ignore an important aspect in Kant’s use of these terms. In the text just mentioned Kant thus explicitly distinguishes between cosmopolitanism as a ‘general philanthropic’ view and a ‘constitution’ of a ‘world citizenry’, a ‘weltbürgerliche Verfassung’. It is the latter that the ‘law of peoples’ aims at, and Kant expresses his doubts about whether the philanthropist condition can be developed into a constitution of world citizenship. ⁸⁶ And, what is more, precisely this distinction is referred to and thus reconfirmed in Toward Perpetual Peace. ⁸⁷

For Kant cosmopolitanism therefore is a kind of philanthropy, which only expresses a general love for people, and as such it is opposed to misanthropy. ⁸⁸ When it comes to the world citizen constitution, Kant already in On the Old Saw recognizes the risk of ‘despotism’ and mentions a federation as a possible solution, since it is also a ‘state of law’, ⁸⁹ and it is this discussion that is continued in Toward Perpetual Peace. There is no doubt that Kant in both these texts deliberately uses words which are appropriate for discussing global matters as political questions such as ‘citizenship’ and ‘constitution’. In contrast, the cosmopolitan view is thought of only as something non-obligatory. It is thus the term ‘world citizen’, not ‘cosmopolitan’ or anything derived from it, which Kant after the French Revolution combines with the normative ideal of constitutional regulation to construct the term ‘Weltbürger-recht’. As Kleingeld has emphasized, the idea of a cosmopolitan law or right is a conceptual innovation of Kant’s, which appears for the first time in Toward Perpetual Peace. ⁹⁰ It therefore seems fair to consider meticulously, how Kant introduces this idea, and doing this, it becomes obvious that Kant deliberately chose to express his idea by employing the term ‘world citizen’ instead of ‘cosmopolitan’.

One might say that it is pure speculation, whether Kant made his choice of words in this context deliberately or not, and that ‘cosmopolitan’ is just a convenient translation for ‘Weltbürger’. Nevertheless, apart from the textual evidence just presented, I will claim that there can also be given good and relevant normative reasons for preferring a political discussion in terms of the law or right of a ‘world citizen’ instead of discussing moral ‘cosmopolitanism’ or the ethical programme of the ‘cosmopolitan’. As mentioned in the first section, being a cosmopolitan does indicate a political leaning, which is compatible with an empire. In ancient Greece cosmopolitanism became an important normative ideal in the Hellenistic period, where the rule was imperial rather than democratic. Being a cosmopolitan does not imply any kind of active or participatory citizenship, and this is the relevant point here. In Toward Perpetual Peace Kant clearly discusses the relation of the world citizen to a universal republic as a special case of the general relation between citizen and republic, and in both cases this relation is conceived of in terms of citizenship, constitution and Recht. And this is not a trivial matter. As Habermas makes clear in his conceptual reconstruction of Kant’s argument, the real problems of the world citizenry start only, when it is to be thought of in terms of right or law, ⁹¹ and this is precisely what Kant aims at. ⁹²

The important point is, that in what is normally the standard reference of Kant’s cosmopolitanism, namely Toward Perpetual Peace, the law of world citizenry comes in only at the secondary level as the third out of three jointly necessary political and legal conditions for perpetual peace, that is, as a sequel to republicanism and federalism. As Jørgen Huggler emphasizes, for Kant cosmopolitanism was a category subordinated under the project of perpetual peace, ⁹³ and it is this lead we should follow. However, taking the terminological argument seriously, we should not think of the Kantian conception of law as a ‘doctrine of cosmopolitanism’, ⁹⁴ as suggested by Benhabib. Of course, it is an improvement when Habermas, Eberl and Niesen characterize Kant’s political and legal programme as ‘weltbürgerlich, ⁹⁵ but the main point is that Kant’s primary concern was the political project of perpetual peace by means of citizenship and constitutional law, and that the law – or right – of the world citizen was just one of the three necessary elements.

Before completing this discussion for now, it has to be mentioned that Kant also discusses the idea of a world citizen law in the Metaphysics of Morals, ⁹⁶ which was published in 1797, only a year after the second edition of Toward Perpetual Peace. It has been argued that Kant in the former book changed his position on some of the core issues, ⁹⁷ but, as Howard Williams has argued at length, although the latter was published first, it can still be considered as containing Kant’s final conclusions on these matters. ⁹⁸ One can, as Eberl and Niesen argue, say that the latter hints at the normative conclusion and an appropriate solution to the problem, namely perpetual peace, whereas the former states the problem in a scholarly manner as part of a doctrine of law and right. ⁹⁹ The problem dealt with in both is thus that the law of peoples until then had allowed each sovereign nation-state to justify waging a war simply by referring to whatever might be in its interest. This Kant wanted to deal with by constructing a new law of peoples banning the idea of just war and thereby the right to wage a war as such. ¹⁰⁰

As the normative conclusion in relation to the choice of major ideology in Pogge’s sense, I therefore think we should refrain from adopting the rather small set of ideas called cosmopolitanism, since it must be understood as just a part of a real major ideology, namely liberalism. Instead of aiming morally or ethically to be cosmopolitans we should direct our normative aspirations on behalf of humanity to a comprehensive normative political and legal programme. We need a programme more likely to counter effectively the arguments for liberating economic desire and to back up disciplining our social activity in general. In short, we should have political aspirations of governing the world with reason within the framework of social democratic states and institutions, not just spending our utopian energies arguing normatively for a liberal programme to secure the safety of the individual economic prospector, or, alternatively, for authoritarian schemes of distributive justice. However, it is in the pursuit of this ambition that I propose we take a look at Kant again.

First, we should thus disentangle Kant from the current discussions of cosmopolitanism. Second, we should stop identifying him politically with the cosmopolitan law or right in isolation. Only then is it possible to recognize that Kant in Toward Perpetual Peace argued that perpetual peace requires the realization of three distinct, but interconnected, species of Recht, namely that of the citizens of a state, that of peoples in relation to each other, and finally that of the citizen of the world. As three species of ‘public law’ ¹⁰¹ they were considered as jointly crucial for attaining perpetual peace, and this argument I will develop further in a forthcoming article on the conditions for the continued progress of genuine democracy. Even though Kant was a very reluctant republican, who only very late in his life came to the point of wishing to assign limited rights to a small amount of citizens, I still think his reflections and conceptual categories can contribute to such a political peace project. As Williams has emphasized, ¹⁰² precisely in relation to decisions about war, Kant was at his best as a modern democratic thinker. In this case Kant actually recognizes that the people have a right to decide, ¹⁰³ and this inspiration I will use in my reflections to come on the possibility of constitutional democracy beyond the state.