Cosmopolitan Citizenship

Abstract

Habermas’s defence of world citizenship clashes with orthodox approaches in which citizenship refers to the specific legal, political and social rights which individuals have as members of separate sovereign states. Traditional perspectives maintain that modern conceptions of citizenship are anchored in the world of the bounded community; they contend that it loses its precise meaning when divorced from territoriality, sovereignty and shared nationality (Miller, below, Chapter 3; see also Miller, 1994, 1995b). Appealing to cosmopolitan citizenship may inspire fellow nationals to honour obligations to peoples elsewhere, but this distorts the notion of citizenship in their view. From their standpoint, to be a citizen is to have concrete rights against, and duties to, a specific sovereign state rather than voluntary and inexact duties to the rest of humanity; it is to belong to a bounded political community which enjoys the right of collective self-determination, and which can decide who can enter its ranks and who can be turned away; it is to have a special bond with others who decide together whether to accept onerous moral obligations to outsiders and how to discharge the duties they impose on themselves. Citizens therefore enjoy privileges as members of sovereign states which aliens do not have, and cannot claim on the grounds of sheer humanity (Bodin, 1967). Traditional approaches argue that appeals to cosmopolitan citizenship amount to little more than an exercise in moral exhortation while the nation-state is the dominant form of political community. Their contention is that the idea of world citizenship may have considerable moral force but, on any strict definition of citizenship, the term is self-evidently and unalterably oxymorolllc. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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