پایگاه تخصصی سیاست بین الملل (  INPO  )‌

زبان تخصصي :‌ ( بین الملل گرایی 2 ) Cosmopolitanisms

1.2 Early Modern and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism slowly began to come to the fore again with the renewed study of more ancient texts, but during the humanist era cosmopolitanism still remained the exception. Despite the fact that ancient cosmopolitan sources were well-known and that many humanists emphasized the essential unity of all religions, they did not develop this idea in cosmopolitan terms. A few authors, however, most notably Erasmus of Rotterdam, explicitly drew on ancient cosmopolitanism to advocate the ideal of a world-wide peace. Emphasizing the unity of humankind over its division into different states and peoples, by arguing that humans are destined by Nature to be sociable and live in harmony, Erasmus pleaded for national and religious tolerance and regarded like-minded people as his compatriots (Querela Pacis).

Early modern natural law theory might seem a likely candidate for spawning philosophical cosmopolitanism. Its secularizing tendencies and the widespread individualist view among its defenders that all humans share certain fundamental characteristics would seem to suggest a point of unification for humankind as a whole. However, according to many early modern theorists, what all individuals share is a fundamental striving for self-preservation, and the universality of this striving does not amount to a fundamental bond that unites (or should unite) all humans in a universal community.

Still, there are two factors that do sometimes push modern natural law theory in a cosmopolitan direction. First, some natural law theorists assume that nature implanted in humans, in addition to the tendency to self-preservation, also a fellow-feeling, a form of sociability that unites all humans at a fundamental level into a kind of world community. The appeal to such a shared human bond was very thin, however, and by no means does it necessarily lead to cosmopolitanism. In fact, the very notion of a natural sociability was sometimes used instead to legitimate war against peoples elsewhere in the world who were said to have violated this common bond in an ‘unnatural’ way, or who were easily said to have placed themselves outside of the domain of common human morality by their ‘barbaric’ customs. Second, early modern natural law theory was often connected with social contract theory, and although most social contract theorists worked out their views mostly, if not solely, for the level of the state and not for that of international relations, the very idea behind social contract theory lends itself for application to this second level. Grotius, Pufendorf, and others did draw out these implications and thereby laid the foundation for international law. Grotius envisioned a “great society of states” that is bound by a “law of nations” that holds “between all states” (De Iure Belli ac Paci, 1625, Prolegomena par. 17; Pufendorf, De Iure Naturae et Gentium, 1672).

The historical context of the philosophical resurgence of cosmopolitanism during the Enlightenment is made up of many factors: The increasing rise of capitalism and world-wide trade and its theoretical reflections; the reality of ever expanding empires whose reach extended across the globe; the voyages around the world and the anthropological so-called ‘discoveries’ facilitated through these; the renewed interest in Hellenistic philosophy; and the emergence of a notion of human rights and a philosophical focus on human reason. Many intellectuals of the time regarded their membership in the transnational ‘republic of letters’ as more significant than their membership in the particular political states they found themselves in, all the more so because their relationship with their government was often strained because of censorship issues. This prepared them to think in terms other than those of states and peoples and adopt a cosmopolitan perspective. Under the influence of the American Revolution, and especially during the first years of the French Revolution, cosmopolitanism received its strongest impulse. The 1789 declaration of ‘human’ rights had grown out of cosmopolitan modes of thinking and reinforced them in turn.

In the eighteenth century, the terms ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘world citizenship’ were often used not as labels for determinate philosophical theories, but rather to indicate an attitude of open-mindedness and impartiality. A cosmopolitan was someone who was not subservient to a particular religious or political authority, someone who was not biased by particular loyalties or cultural prejudice. Furthermore, the term was sometimes used to indicate a person who led an urbane life-style, or who was fond of traveling, cherished a network of international contacts, or felt at home everywhere. In this sense the Encyclopédie mentioned that ‘cosmopolitan’ was often used to signify a “man of no fixed abode, or a man who is nowhere a stranger.” Though philosophical authors such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Addison, Hume, and Jefferson identified themselves as cosmopolitans in one or more of these senses, these usages are not of much philosophical interest.

Especially in the second half of the century, however, the term was increasingly also used to indicate particular philosophical convictions. Some authors revived the Cynic tradition. Fougeret de Montbron in his 1753 autobiographical report, Le Cosmopolite, calls himself a cosmopolitan, describes how he travels everywhere without being committed to anywhere, declaring “All the countries are the same to me” and “[I am] changing my places of residence according to my whim” (p. 130).

Despite the fact that only a few authors committed themselves to this kind of cosmopolitanism, this was the version that critics of cosmopolitanism took as their target. For example, Rousseau complains that cosmopolitans “boast that they love everyone [tout le monde, which also means ‘the whole world’], to have the right to love no one” (Geneva Manuscript version of The Social Contract, 158). Johann Georg Schlosser, in the critical poem ‘Der Kosmopolit’ writes, “It is better to be proud of one's nation than to have none,” obviously assuming that cosmopolitanism implies the latter.

Yet most eighteenth-century defenders of cosmopolitanism did not recognize their own view in these critical descriptions. They understood cosmopolitanism not as a form of ultra-individualism, but rather, drawing on the Stoic tradition, as implying the positive moral ideal of a universal human community, and they did not regard this ideal as inimical to more particular attachments such as patriotism. Some, like the German author Christoph Martin Wieland, stayed quite close to Stoic views. Others developed a cosmopolitan moral theory that was distinctively new. According to Kant, all rational beings are members in a single moral community. They are analogous to citizens in the political (republican) sense in that they share the characteristics of freedom, equality, and independence, and that they give themselves the law. Their common laws, however, are the laws of morality, grounded in reason. Early utilitarian cosmopolitans like Jeremy Bentham, by contrast, defended their cosmopolitanism by pointing to the “common and equal utility of all nations.” Moral cosmopolitanism could be grounded in human reason, or in some other characteristic universally shared among humans (and in some cases other kinds of beings) such as the capacity to experience pleasure or pain, a moral sense, or the aesthetic imagination. Moral cosmopolitans regarded all humans as ‘brothers’ (though with obvious gender bias) — an analogy with which they aimed to indicate the fundamental equality of rank of all humans, which precluded slavery, colonial exploitation, feudal hierarchy, and tutelage of various sorts.

Some cosmopolitans developed their view into a political theory about international relations. The most radical of eighteenth-century political cosmopolitans was no doubt Anacharsis Cloots (Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grace, baron de Cloots, 1755-1794). Cloots advocated the abolition of all existing states and the establishment of a single world state under which all human individuals would be directly subsumed. His arguments drew first of all on the general structure of social contract theory. If it is in the general interest for everyone to submit to the authority of a state that enforces laws that provide security, then this argument applies world-wide and justifies the establishment of a world-wide “republic of united individuals,” not a plurality of states that find themselves in the state of nature vis-à-vis each other. Second, he argues that sovereignty should reside with the people, and that the concept of sovereignty itself, because it involves indivisibility, implies that there can be but one sovereign body in the world, namely, the human race as a whole (La république universelle ou adresse aux tyrannicides, 1792; Bases constitutionelles de la république du genre humain, 1793).

Most other political cosmopolitans did not go as far as Cloots. Immanuel Kant, most famously, advocated a much weaker form of international legal order, namely, that of a ‘league of nations.’ In Perpetual Peace (1795) Kant argues that true and world-wide peace is possible only when states are organized internally according to ‘republican’ principles, when they are organized externally in a voluntary league for the sake of keeping peace, and when they respect the human rights not only of their citizens but also of foreigners. He argues that the league of states should not have coercive military powers because that would violate the internal sovereignty of states, constitute a potential danger to individual freedoms already established within those states (if the federal authority were less respectful of human rights than some of the member states) and reduce the chances that states would actually join.

Some critics argued in response that Kant's position was inconsistent, on the grounds that the only way to fully overcome the state of nature among states was for them to enter into a federative unity of states with coercive powers. They transformed the concept of sovereignty in the process, by conceiving it as layered, and this enabled them to argue that states ought to transfer part of their sovereignty to the federal level, but only that part that concerns their external relations to other states, while retaining the sovereignty of the states concerning their internal affairs (the early Fichte). Romantic authors, on the other hand, felt that the ideal state should not have to involve coercion at all, and hence also that the cosmopolitan ideal should be that of a world-wide republic of ‘fraternal’ non-authoritarian republics (the young Friedrich Schlegel).

Kant also introduced the concept of "cosmopolitan law," suggesting a third sphere of public law — in addition to constitutional law and international law — in which both states and individuals have rights, and where individuals have these rights as "citizens of the earth" rather than as citizens of particular states.