POLI 342 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Cosmopolitan Democracy, Individualism, Democratic Deficit
11 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Global Justice
• Third view not found in readings, normative
• Cosmopolitan democracy= institutional and moral principles
• Pogges (not in our readings): 3 basic principles
o Individualism: basic units/agents
o Universality: status attaches to everyone equally
o Generality: global force, applies irrespective of political community
• Must respect everyone’s status
• Political cosmopolitanism: global project/citizenship, etc.
o Debate amongst cosmopolitans
• Historically, few argued for a world state i.e. Pogge, Kant
• Must reflect moral cosmopolitan commitments i.e. duties beyond political borders
o How “thick” is the cosmopolitanism
• Human rights as the undisputed general universal standard
• Currently, everyone appears to be cosmopolitans in their adherence to human
rights
• Idea of a world state has been renewed recently i..e UN from various IR
perspectives
World State
• Dante advocated for a Christian unity through a monarch – war would be
eradicated, would not desire anything further
o Found in his Monarchia, a universal supreme judge
• Otherwise, many-headed beast chasing to fulfill their greed
• Rousseau-Abbey: universal sovereign with a congress that makes binding
decisions
• Kant: reasonable, but not pragmatic (republic)
• Contemporary- global political order connected to democracy (collective decision
making through people who would be subjected to the decisions made)
• The people should decide themselves
• Democratic presupposes a “demos” (community)
o Struggles led to great achievements i.e. accountability, discipline,
consultative bodies
• Focus on self-determining bounding communities and fail to recognize the
opponents that undermine them
o Disjunctures include internationalization of decision-making that
undermine sovereignty, collective security apparatuses, global economy v.
national economy
• No control over international democracy
o Complex accountability and evades it
• Sovereignty is also challenged: can’t be an account without a global system
