1. Introduction
Cosmopolitanism, commonly defined as the feeling of world citizenship, was a doctrine I proudly embodied throughout much of high school and into college, and after I was admitted to Columbia College, the admissions officer said it was my “world citizenship that the admissions committee so admired and wished for Columbia to help flourish”. This wish validated a what felt like a core feature of my identity; this was how my Persian, Russian and European roots seemed to coalesce and where an internalized feeling of “otherness” had morphed into an appreciation of a borderless identity. One that could not, and would not, be boxed in. I began to worry less about a rational justification for world citizenship, and relied more on a subjective feeling of oneness with humanity.
When I started college, however, subscribing to romanticized, and somewhat foggy, ideals waxed inauthentic and hollow. Unpacking as well as critically appraising, became essential, and I knew soon I would have to subject these starry-eyed ideals to further scrutiny.
Back in high school, my graduation speech had paid tribute to what I perceived to be a beautiful union of historically warring nations. The school I attended, known as the European School of Luxembourg, was first built with the objective of providing an education to the children of employees of the institutions of the European Coal and Steel Community— a forerunner of today's European Union(EU). The schools have multiple language sections, so each year group has around 9 different classes of students, each speaking both the languages of their respective home countries, and at least two other EU languages. As a result of this multilingualism, classes include a mix of students from different language sections, fostering a diverse learning environment. This school system soon attracted the EU founding father Jean Monnet, to which he famously remarked,
“Educated side by side, untroubled from infancy by divisive prejudices, acquainted with all that is great and good in the different cultures, it will be borne upon them as they mature that they belong together. Without ceasing to look to their own lands with love and pride, they will become in mind Europeans, schooled and ready to complete and consolidate the work of their fathers before them, to bring into being a united and thriving Europe.”
In my eyes, my school served as an idealistic microcosm of the European Union, (as well as a future unified world), where members felt a parallel and virtuous synergy between their national and supranational identities. I reasoned that if this supranational identity in Europe was possible, so too could a borderless global identity be realized. As such, in my speech, I sought to empower the student body as the future leaders of society, and proclaimed my faith in a future characterized by this oneness.
Though perhaps not explicitly aimed at cultivating this collective identity, international schools all over the world also nurture this unconfined sense of self, wherein many students, often the children of expats, feel less bound to a single nation, and leave feelingthis sense of world citizenship. For me personally, this feeling became my biggest blind spot.
In the realm of foreign relations, unions, such as the EU for example, are predicated on the assumption that this collective spirit can be passively extended to the growing numbers of nations and EU citizens, without consolidating the identity within. The present paper looks at how world citizenship can be both viable and pragmatic, but in its current conformation is hampered by an inability to reckon with the deep challenges a collective citizenship inevitably faces, namely that of establishing universal rights and values. This limitation has fallen prey to demoralizing remarks from powerful leaders such as Theresa May, who famously stated that “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”.
The paper puts Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin in conversation on this concept of world citizenship, and finally argues that the current world order, with both the predicaments and the promises it faces, is in dire need of a fortified cosmopolitanism that must rectify the virulent critiques Arendt and Berlin raise; these include the question of universal rights and universal values respectively. For the purposes of this essay, a resilient cosmopolitanism is one that not only ratifies universal rights and universal values but secures them — the squaring and securing of such universals, I argue, is a sufficient condition for world citizenship.
2. Cosmopolitanism on the Basis of Universal Moral Laws
My high school self related to Diogenes the Cynic who, upon being asked where he came from, replied with “I am a citizen of the world”. He wished not to be identified based on locality, but rather based on universal aspirations and goals. The cynics deemed social status, class rank, nationality, and even gender, as secondary, morally irrelevant attributes, and focused more on the worth of reason and ethics to define one’s humanity. The stoics took this notion a step further and coined the term “world citizen”, and put forward the argument that each individual lives in the local community of their birth, andthe community of human argument and aspiration (Nussbaum, 29). They believed that in the latter community presided our most fundamental moral and social obligations. To this Plutarch asserts that “we should regard all human beings as our fellow demesmen and fellow citizens, and there should be one way of life and one order” (Plutarch, 429). Even though their conception of the world was relatively parochial, the idea that we should unite with other humans in a global community, viewing ourselves as deeply linked to humankind as a whole, rings both true and relevant to many people today.
To the Stoics, this link stemmed from the rational faculties all humans share, which they regarded as divine and dignified, and worthy of universal, mutual respect. As reason was a defining feature of human beings, humanity as a whole was rational and thus unified under a common idea of law. As the Stoic philosophers had a strong influence on the political endeavors of the state, the laws revolved around reason. It is to this end that they affirm the commonality of law based on the commonality of reason. Since law forms the polity, a global city state arises when all citizens are bound by a common law, and therefore have a common identity, which encapsulates “world citizenship”.
Kant takes this concept of law providing a basis for commonality and hence unity a step further with his universal moral law. In the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals (GW), he pioneers a metaphysical, deontological ethics, which he calls morality. It is predicated on the idea of an autonomous will that can do the right thing for the right reasons , the right reasons being nothing but one’s duty to the moral law. This moral law, also known as the “Categorical Imperative”, is first and foremost formulated by the Formula of Universal Law, famously characterized by the principle that one should “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (Kant, GW 4:421). This law functions as a tool to determine what one oughtto do in any given moment and extends the perspective of the individual moral agent to a universal perspective. Furthermore, when moral decisions concern other humans, Kant proposes another derivation of the moral law, which he called the Formula of Humanity. It states that one should “use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” (Kant, GW, 4:428). The second derivation of the moral law gives rise to the Kingdom of Ends, or better translated as a “realm of free rational beings”, equal in humanity and equally deserving of certain rights and privileges. In a sense, by uniting these two derivations of the moral law, he is recasting Stoic notion of respecting humanity through a metaphysical lens.
Kant unites his moral beliefs with his political beliefs in Toward Perpetual Peace (PP), thereby moving from the individual moral agent to a moral polis. His main claim regarding cosmopolitanism is that commonality must be buttressed by legislation. He therefore proposes a cosmopolitan law as a “necessary complement to the unwritten code of the political and international law” (Kant, PP, 108). He grounds this cosmopolitan law in the undeniable interconnectedness of worldly affairs. He says, “A violation of laws in one part of the world,” he says, “is felt everywhere” (Kant, PP, 107-8). This seems to be what world news is predicated on — the notion that injustice or breaches of humanitarianism reverberate and are felt everywhere. Due to mass media outlets, we no longer have to be in physical proximity with those suffering to feel their pain, and this growing cross-continental empathy facilitates an understanding of different ways of thinking that is consistent with seeing oneself as a world citizen. In this book he harps on our oneness as a human race occupying one planet and speaks of the right of all human beings to a “communal possession of the earth’s surface” (Kant, PP, 106).
As Martha Nussbaum says in her essay on Kant and Cosmopolitanism, “Kant defended a politics based upon reason rather than patriotism or group sentiment, a politics that was truly universal rather than communitarian, a politics that was active, reformist and optimistic” (Nussbaum, 27). Kant rose in the Enlightenment to defend the possibility of peace between nations, and that citizens can have parallel identities as citizens of their nations and of the world. Of course, his conception of the world differed greatly from today’s world, but he nevertheless vouched for system of laws that transcended that of a nation, or empire. In order to vindicate his propositions, he highlights the interconnectedness of the world, where,
“The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is therefore not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of humanity. Only under this condition can we flatter ourselves that we are continually advancing towards a perpetual peace.” (Kant, PP, 107–8)
As such, there needs to be a mutual respect for human rights that traverses national or cultural borders. These rights should be initiated through the moral law, but safeguarded by a third sphere of public law, following constitutional and international law, namely cosmopolitan law. In this law, both states and individuals have rights by virtue of being citizens of the world, rather than merely citizens of particular states quathe kingdom of ends. The moral stance that each individual has an equal worth and must be treated as an end, is prior to the politics of the state, i.e., morality is supreme over politics, both constraining and directing political thought. This moral world transcends the physical boundaries and deals exclusively with us quarational beings. That is not to say that the physical body and its temporal affiliations to a nation state are null and void, since even in his later works he clarifies that “dutiful global and local patriotism…both are proper to the cosmopolite, who in fealty to his country must have an inclination to promote the well-being of the entire world.” (Kant, EE, 27:674/675). The crux of his argument is that there are realms conducive to unity and others marked by division, with neither being bad in and of itself. However, as a result of these different realms of existence, unity is possible, since we can unite as citizens of the world in one realm, but also follow different more local aims as citizens of a given country. Key here is that this transcendence of the human above the contingent affiliations to a country is on the level of ideas, and does not necessarily depend on believing in some providential force governing the universe. That is, whether we exist in an ordered or unordered universe — one with or without a spiritual component — humanity is what has emerged, and it intrinsically demands respect. Thus, systematizing the universe by forging peace on earth, thereby, imposing order on it, instead of deluding us, empowers us to fashion our own imperatives. These imperatives will then facilitate peaceful mutual relations, which he thinks will eventually be regulated by public law, bringing humans ever closer to a cosmopolitan constitution (Kant, PP 106).
Although Kant acknowledges the necessity of nation states, his account of the cosmopolitan law is somehow both predicated on the existence of nation states, but also fails to square its relationship with the nation state. Furthermore, the rights the cosmopolitan law supposedly springs from the bare nature of man, and humanity aloneaffirms the right to have rights beyond those specified in national law. Hannah Arendt, a prominent German political theorist who fled from the oppressive Nazi Regime in 1941, rounds out the importance of national ties in the securing of one’s humanity. She argues that, rather than the inherent humanity of each individual being prior to the state and its national divisors, it depends on and emerges from one’s affiliation to a nation state. Affirming world citizenship and therefore some sense of universal rights, must have a guarantor, or community of guarantors, if it is to prevail.
3. The Fragility of Universal Rights
At the beginning of the ninth chapter or Origins of Totalitarianism (OT), entitled “Decline of Nation State: End of the Rights of Man”, she describes the catastrophic state in Europe post World War I. Due to the many civil wars that erupted following the economic and political disarray of the post-war period, floods of migrants were expelled from their homelands and were not welcomed nor assimilated anywhere (Arendt, OT, 267). “Once they had left their homeland”, she says, “they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rightsthey were rightless,the scum of the earth” (ibid). This I believe is an observation that frames her pointed critique of the universal rights and humanity that form the basis of the Kantian (as well as my initial) understanding of cosmopolitanism. These stateless individuals, once citizens of a nation state, surely enjoying rights and privileges, were stripped of their humanity once their nation states crumbled. Out of the liquidation of the multinational states of pre-war Europe, Russia and Austria-Hungary emerged the stateless and the minorities who had lost their so-called inalienable Rights of Man and consequently had no governments to represent and to protect them. They were at best subject to the law of exception of the Minority Treaties which had no teeth, or lived under complete lawlessness. The League of Nations, for example, mandated lasting legal infrastructure for minorities, which meant that an outside body was guaranteeing these individuals elementary rights in an unprecedented way. This transpired as a result of statesmen of various countries denying rights to people who had a different nationality, while also insisting that only nationals, i.e., people of the same national origin, could be citizens and enjoy the full protection of legal institutions — that is, unless the minorities completely assimilated or disbanded their origins (Arendt, OT, 275). However, the League of Nations a supranational and, therefore more abstract and vulnerable, institution disintegrated as soon as countries refused to cede national interest and subsidiarity. The fall of the League of Nations, a system profoundly inspired by Kant’s cosmopolitan law, exposes the illusion of humanity to Arendt.
“At the time of the Minority Treaties it could be, and was, argued in their favor, as it was their excuse that the older nations enjoyed constitutions which implicitly or explicitly were founded upon the Rights of Man, that even if there were other nationalities within their borders they needed no additional law for them, and that only in the newly established succession states was temporary enforcement of human rights necessary as a compromise and exception. The arrival of the stateless people brought an end to this illusion.” (Arendt, OT, 276)
That is, the treatment of the stateless people debunked the idealistic faith in the respect for individuals quatheir humanity, at least on a national scale. She regrettably admits that humanity “found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human” (Arendt, OT, 299). Only in a footnote to her discussion of stateless peoples does she claim that the United States place stateless immigrants on equal footing to other foreigners on account of their common status as prospective citizens. The complexion of the US’s immigration policy has changed considerably since Arendt’s time, with naturalization becoming an ever trickier process. In practice, although the US purports to open its doors to those in need of asylum, its stringent documentation process unearths a similar disregard for humans quahumans. As such, the very basis for cosmopolitan law subsisting in the “kingdom of ends”, readily dissolves in the face of war and instability.
Arendt’s analysis of the conditions following the decline of the nation state questions cosmopolitanism on the grounds that it is predicated on there being some inherent value to human beings that warrants respect for certain inalienable rights derived from human dignity, as these very rights were vividly renounced in her lifetime. Throughout the nineteenth century, there emerged a new state of affairs, or what Arendt called the “new arbitrariness of society” (Arendt, OT, 291), and the consensus of opinion was that human rights protected individuals from the spectres of this arbitrariness. Initially, no authority would be needed to enforce these values if they were inalienable, irreducible and undeducible from other rights or laws, rather they were invoked in the name of Man. However, man does not exist in a vacuum, but in a social order that safeguards these “human rights”. Less developed, i.e., colonized societies, were not entitled to these rights. The “emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one’s people” (291), otherwise known as the French people were the guarantors, with “man” being a synecdoche for thenationalcommunity as a whole. Arendt makes a point of “one’s people”, implying that only the community one belongs to is meant here. Loss of national rights would then inevitably lead to the loss of human rights, as there was no longer a community for the rights to be exercised in. Given the organized and partitioned sense of humanity, the loss of a home and political status makes one alien to the world, which is why, as Burke says, it does not make sense to speak of the inalienable rights of man, but rather the “rights of an Englishman” (Arendt, OT, 299). A community is prior to the validity of one’s rights, as they are the ones willing to guarantee these rights (Arendt, OT, 297), and so one could imagine that a global community could issue these “global” rights, thereby preserving this humanity beyond their home countries. Arendt seems to believe that this prospect would transcend the current state of international law, which is still based on reciprocal relationships between sovereign states, but could exist if it retires from the idealistic pretensions that underlie the United Nations or current day EU — pretensions that are merely declarationsof oneness, lacking in ensuring securityof it.
Another facet of the nation states necessity for Rights of Man is that it represses the exacerbation of inequality, which she thinks occur naturally in humanity’s natural state. It does so by mediating the relationship between private and public sphere. The former, as Arendt says, is marked by difference, and the latter by equality. Equality, however, does not exist outside the realm of human organization. She does not believe we are equal in the state of nature, but that we becomeequal (Arendt, OT, 301). She stresses less the idiosyncrasies or discrepancies in the individual, and more so on the status one has to have to even possess those diverse traits in a way that is respected. She does say that it is the slight differences that give us, as individuals validity, and the nation state adjudicates the interactions between these differences. On the one hand, she is thereby putting pressure on the claim that one could have this collective citizenship, as that would entail a collective identity, leading to no variation, and therefore no individual value. On the other hand, she is making a much more nuanced claim about the relationship between the nation state and our pluralistic identities. People being forced to live outside their nation states means they are thrown back on their mere differentiation (Arendt, OT, 302), lacking the “equalizing of differences” (ibid), which nation states administer by invoking the commonality of citizenship to the given nation. Their expulsion from a nation state means they cannot participate in the human artifice and their humanness and individuality is marred. As such, Arendt warns us in her portentous last lines to the chapter that “the danger is that a global universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages” (Arendt, OT, 302), which prompts the question, is a cosmopolitan world a world in which, as May too insinuates, a savage world?
4. The Fallibility of Universal Values
Isaiah Berlin seems to hearken to her warning by seconding this need for a nation state and scrutinizing thereby not only the appeal to universal rights, but also the appeal to universal ideals or values. An appeal to universal ideals is not only dangerous,but logically incoherent.To be a citizen means to subscribe to a pattern of values, and these different patterns are intrinsically incompatible or as he says “incommensurable”. He grapples with the challenge of finding this basis in a number of his essays, including in The Pursuit of the Idealfrom The Crooked Timber of Humanity (CTH) wherein he advocates for a pluralistsociety rather than aharmonizedone. He posits that maybe all supreme values pursued by mankind are not necessarily compatible with one another; cultures have different values, and many of these “Great Goods” are antagonistic. As such, rather than there being a harmonized basis for world citizenship, there is a plurality of civilizations, each one with its own unique pattern. The delusion that there should be harmony is attributed to what he calls the “three-legged stool” Western cultures sit on in Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West. Specifically, it concerns the third leg, which he describes as the assumption thatcorrect answers must be consistent and compatible with one another and that the summation of these truths is a prerequisite for the perfect life. These correct answers are understood to be the universal values which would form the commonalities world citizenship is grounded on.
Berlin draws extensively on the German eighteenth century thinker Johann Gottfried Herder, who claims that societies have their own “center of gravity” (Berlin, CTH, 10), and these centers vary. He says, “The Greeks differ from the Lutheran German, the Chinese differ from both; what they strive after and what they fear or worship are scarcely ever similar” (ibid). Herder and Berlin steadfastly maintain that values are irreconcilable, moving away from a rhetoric of harmony in a global, cosmopolitan sense, to a rhetoric of collision, since that is the most realistic and practical. This direct jab at cosmopolitan enthusiasts undercuts Kant and the Stoics dogged pursuit of unifyingthe entire world, in favor of coexistingwith it, by accusing this notion of a perfect whole as not only unattainable and conceptually incoherent (ibid), but also the result of favoring “unattainable” contentment over an understanding of what it is to be human (Berlin, CTH, 14).
Since the veracity of cosmopolitanism hinges on the universalizability, and hence the harmonizability, of some ideals, Berlin opposes it on account of its quixotic nature. In his essay The Counter-Enlightenment in the book Against the Current(CE),Berlin argues that Cosmopolitanism is the shedding of all that makes man most human and most oneself (Berlin, CE, 255). What he defines as constituting the self is membership to a distinctive community that one can call one’s own. For the purposes of this essay, it pays to scrutinize what exactly Berlin means by “community” and how his claims square with the contemporary world. For example, he maintains that:
“To belong to a given community, to be connected with its members by indissoluble and impalpable ties of common language, historical memory, habit, tradition and feeling, is a basic human need no less natural than that for food or drink or security or procreation. One nation can understand and sympathize with the institutions of another only because it knows how much its own mean to itself.” (Berlin, CE, 16)
Now in this argument, one could take issue with the “indissoluble and impalpable ties” that he speaks of; in the Western world, in light of immigration and globalization, many of these ties are dissolving and fading with the fusion of different cultures. Furthermore, open borders in supranational unions such as the EU undermine the primacy of national affiliations. As philosopher Lewis Gordon suggested at one of his talks recently at Columbia, the world is getting closer together as distance is minimized because we can traverse space faster. Moreover, borders overall are getting more porous, which leads to the decentralization and diffusion of value systems. Although Portuguese citizens may still cling to their traditions and cultural ties while in Luxembourg, for example, after one or two generations, they start to develop a hybrid identity that is not fully one or the other. In America, various diasporas feel their heritage coupled to their identity as American, which is why there are these hyphenated identities such as Asian-American. However, a caveat to this trend is projecting this unconfined identity to the rest of the world, claiming that just because places like the US can be considered a melting pot of cultures, one cannot assume that this willingness to engage with different cultures and expand one’s identity is felt everywhere. The reality is that millions of people have never experienced the world beyond their communities, and may not have a desire to. It is true that with staggering rates of urbanization and widespread permeation of media, a so-called global community is emerging in some spheres, but a universal status of the individual in the global community is still unresolved.
Nevertheless, Berlin and Arendt’s conception of the status of the individual converge in saying that the value of humans lies in their differences. Berlin says,
“For those who embrace this romantically tinged individualism, what matters is not the common base but the differences, not the one but the many; for them the craving for unity—the regeneration of mankind by recovery of a lost innocence and harmony, the return from a fragmented existence to the all-embracing whole—is an infantile and dangerous delusion: to crush all diversity and even conflict in the interest of uniformity, is, for them, to crush life itself.” (Berlin, CTH, 49)
He derides unity as being a “dangerous delusion” that morphs diversity into uniformity, following Arendt’s line of reasoning, if we do not, we need to acknowledge the multiplicity, and therefore granular differences, between individuals. The naive fantasy of an all-embracing whole misses the mark of our true natures, the collection of which is necessarily pulverized, rather than cohesive. Trying to anneal the fragments together in the statement that we are world citizens, as the Stoics and Kant defend is ludicrous, and desperately forges some commonality beyond the bare minimum that exists, and has proved, by history, to be unfulfilling. He would even go so far as to dismiss Arendt’s conviction in her book The Human Conditionthat “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” (Arendt, HC, 9) i.e., we are all same in that we are different, on account of her conviction being a fallacious and failed attempt at harmonizing values. The most sensible approach would be to find an equilibrium that is sustainable, even if unstable, between these incompatible doctrines and enter into a social contract in which we avow to coexist. His proposal is neo-Hobbesian in that it mandates an ideological leviathan, namely pluralism, to bind individuals into a social contract. The lack of a common denominator applicable to all humans, other than very elementary ones such as solidarity for the suffering, readily descends into tribalism, with phenomena such as identity politics leaving society, or at least liberal society, as a pile of shards.
Berlin’s fatal premise is, however, that these values themselves all assume the same shape and tenor, and exist in a binary relationship with all other values, where everything that is not precisely your belief falls under the category of the other. Amartya Sen, in his book Identity and Violence, criticizes this parochial and somewhat oversimplified view of humans as being apostles of a certain set of coherent beliefs inherited from a given culture or nation. He argues that in this view there is (i) no synergy between these beliefs, (ii) clear cut divisions along national or cultural lines, and (iii) a minimum, baseline number of commonalities that enable this equilibrium to exist. This pertains to what Gandhi would call a “vivisectional view of society” — a set of values strung together, rather than a set of core values that are weaved into the fabric of society (Sen, 181). The primacy of the nation state plays a central role for both writers, and the critical analysis of universal rights and values respectively puts pressure on the prospect of claiming world citizenship, if we are to consider citizenship to be a guardian of rights and an instiller of certain values. However, Sen highlights the naïveté of Berlin’s thinking, namely, the thought that difference in values only manifests on a macro level, i.e., between cultures — in reality, the complex difference in values manifests, in addition, on the micro level, i.e., between individuals.
Such an argument breaks down if we have to assume a symmetry or bilateral relationship, which is implicit in us being treated as citizens of the world and treating others as such. As Arendt remarks, “A man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow man” (Arendt, OT, 300), suggesting that each individual must be conferred a symmetrical degree of dignity and personal validity, such that all world citizens can be treated as such. Sen complexifies the individual but indicates that what brings different individuals together under one nation is not the collective holding of the samevalues but the collective holding of somevalues. If world citizenship fulfills its telos as a liberal, pacifying movement, it must appeal to everyone in this manner — as a commonly held universal value despiteother values, which perhaps cannot be reconciled. The mere concept of being human is not enough, and neither is clinging to a vague moral platitude, what we need is a realization of the values that are universal, based on common denominators such as the importance of family or the fact that we all share a planet, and therefore control our passions to stop ‘otherising’ and start including. It may be true that out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made, but the integrity of humanity still holds and it is with the understanding that certain values can be made universal and citizenship is a marker and vehicle that functions to secure such values.
In fact, the problem with the United Nations (UN) is that there is no unity or global consensus. It is a band aid solution to the growing inequality and ideological gulfs existing between different factions around the world. The UN, a spuriousattempt at enforcing these rights, is only supposedly fueled by these universal values that underlie the Human Rights. Since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the UN has earnestly sought to protect human rights through legal instruments and on-ground activities. Despite these ambitions, the UN cannot stem the tide of many global challenges we are facing today such as climate change, global financial crisis, pandemics, terrorism, migration, genocide or the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It was created in an era so mired in destruction and decay that its only initial mandate was to prevent yet another war. In present day, the bar is set higher, yet the UN lacks the power, authority, legitimacy or tools necessary. It is now only a beacon of ideals, ideals that have yet to be realized and secured universally. In parallel, with the advances in transportation, communications, trade and technology, the world is becoming inexorably more interconnected, and cosmopolitanism is in many places the new vogue. Although those privileged to attend schools such as mine (although mine cultivated a European, not global, spirit) or have the opportunity to travel around the world may feel this visceral connection with humans outside their spheres, occurrences such as Brexit or the terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka only vindicate the claim that nativism and tribalism are still potent, unbridled forces that are an indigenous element of human culture.
5. Concluding Remarks
The UN may currently serve as a beacon for ideals such as unity and oneness that many are inspired by; however, to transform ideals to practical realities, we have to harness our passions, such as this prioritization of the “Us,” to reevaluate our prejudices towards the “Them.” This “harnessing” is what originally propelled the now adulterated notion of political correctness: scrutinizing the speech and imagery associated with those historically dehumanized, to shift the mental habits and passions towards viewing humans as equal and dignified. Thought is in a symbiotic relationship with language, where changing one bears on the other. This would notbe a band aid solution to discrimination, but rather a deeper, more grassroots approach. Rather than trying to speedily and radically eradicate racial, sexual and economic injustice in one go, we can sensibly move forward by supporting certain approaches that through law and advocacy shift the conversations, while keeping in mind that law is only secondary. Prior to law comes the reformation of passions. That is, it becomes apparent that law is that which secures our values but also apparent that the formulation of these laws subsists on inherent conceptions of rights and values. Grassroots reform can be catalyzed by those who claim to hold a cosmopolitan disposition — those who constantly look toward the beacons i.e. institutions such as the UN, and thinkers such as Kant or the Stoics. Arendt, Berlin, and Sen scrutinize these beacons, revealing that ideas grounded in nothing are ideas grounded in nothing — they necessitate practical action if we wish to approach something like global citizenship and have it be universal and symmetrical.
Although these authors each bring their own complexities to my previous, perhaps naive, understanding of a cosmopolitan, global community, they haven’t discounted my hope for one. Rather, analyzing their claims has informed my understanding of the sufficient conditions that would guarantee such a society: universal rights, instituted in the capacity of the human artifice that secure our equalities and, in the capacity of a universal value, safeguard against the exacerbation of our differences, whether they be cultural, value or otherwise. That is, the two main obstacles, which manifest, are rights and values. I realize that we do not in fact live in a cosmopolitan world, and hence world citizenship is not yet an actual status, as May contends. Now, at least, I have a better understanding of what could get us there. Feelings of global citizenship without security of these sentiments is vacuous. How to get there is a challenge, but one that is surmountable given guidance and a goal. I therefore continue to be inspired by what Kant says in his Theory and Practice:
“However uncertain I may be and may remain as to whether we can hope for anything better for mankind, this uncertainty cannot detract from the maxim I have adopted, or from the necessity of assuming for practical purposes that human progress is possible. This hope for better times to come, without which an earnest desire to do something useful for the common good would never have inspired the human heart, has always influenced the activities of right-thinking people.” (Kant, TP, 89)
Works Cited
Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (OT)
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (HC)
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (GW)
Immanuel Kant, Theory and Practise (TP)
Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace (PP)
Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current (CE)
Isaiah Berlin, Crooked Timber of Humanity (CTH)
Martha Nussbaum, Kant and Cosmopolitanism
Plutarch, On the Fortunes of Alexander