New Rights for Old? Cosmopolitan Citizenship and the Critique of State Sovereignty
| Date | 01 June 2003 |
| Author | David Chandler |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00427 |
| Published date | 01 June 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
New Rights for Old? Cosmopolitan
Citizenship and the Critique of
State Sovereignty
David Chandler
University of Westminster
Cosmopolitan international relations theorists envisage a process of expanding cosmopolitan
democracy and global governance, in which for the first time there is the possibility of global issues
being addressed on the basis of new forms of democracy, derived from the universal rights of global
citizens. They suggest that, rather than focus attention on the territorially limited rights of the
citizen at the level of the nation-state, more emphasis should be placed on extending democracy
and human rights to the international sphere. This paper raises problems with extending the
concept of rights beyond the bounds of the sovereign state, without a mechanism of making these
new rights accountable to their subject. The emerging gap, between holders of cosmopolitan rights
and those with duties, tends to create dependency rather than to empower. So while the new
rights remain tenuous, there is a danger that the cosmopolitan framework can legitimise the
abrogation of the existing rights of democracy and self-government preserved in the UN Charter
framework.
How should we assess the trend towards increasing prominence for individual
rights in the international sphere and the restricted interpretation of traditional
rights of sovereign independence and self-government? Over the last decade, many
leading international relations theorists have developed a cosmopolitan per-
spective, which sees current trends as benign or potentially positive.1Leading cos-
mopolitan theorists seek to challenge the inter-state framework of the UN Charter
period, established in the aftermath of the Second World War, which prioritised
the principles of sovereign equality and of non-intervention. They argue that these
principles need to be replaced by new ones based on a higher level of public
accountability, which make the universal individual rights of members of ‘global
society’ the primary focus. Rather than the rights of states being the founding prin-
ciple of international society it should be the rights of individual citizens. Today, a
new consensus is forming that ‘there is a pressing need to rethink the concept and
practice of sovereignty’ (Camilleri and Falk, 1992). Andrea Bianchi argues that the
values and principles governing international law are under challenge:
The two opposite poles of the spectrum are evident. On the one hand,
there stands the principle of sovereignty with its many corollaries ...
on the other, the notion that fundamental human rights should be
respected. While the first principle is the most obvious expression and
ultimate guarantee of a horizontally-organized community of equal and
independent states, the second view represents the emergence of values
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2003 VOL 51, 332–349
© Political Studies Association, 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
COSMOPOLITAN CITIZENSHIP 333
and interests ... which deeply [cut] across traditional precepts of state
sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states
(Bianchi, 1999, p. 260).
Geoffrey Robertson QC, a leading advocate of individual rights and author of Crimes
Against Humanity: the Struggle for Global Justice argues:
Customary international law is in the human rights field anachronistic,
to the extent that it is an emanation of agreements between sovereign
states. ... [M]illions of ordinary men and women ... do not talk about
jus cogens and erga omnes: they believe in the simple language of the
Universal Declaration, and they are not bound by Article 2(7) of the
UN Charter to avert their eyes from repression in foreign countries ...
These citizens, of global society rather than the nation state, cannot
understand why human rights rules should not rule (Robertson, 1999,
p. 82).
Cosmopolitan democrats argue that democracy and accountability can no longer
be equated with sovereignty and non-intervention: ‘democracy must transcend the
borders of single states and assert itself on a global level’ (Archibugi, 2000, p. 144).
To meet the needs of cosmopolitan or global citizens it is necessary to extend
democracy beyond the nation-state. David Beetham argues that in a world of
nation-states ‘the demos that is democracy’s subject has come to be defined almost
exclusively in national terms, and the scope of democratic rights has been limited
to the bounds of the nation-state’ (Beetham, 1999, p. 137). He suggests that in the
same way that democracy was extended from the level of the town to that of the
state in the eighteenth century it should, in the twenty-first century, be extended
from the nation to humankind as a whole.
The reason for this new and more expansive institutionalisation of democracy is
held to be the impact of globalising processes, which have created a ‘democratic
deficit’ at the national level. Daniele Archibugi and David Held assert that deci-
sions made democratically by citizens of one state or region can no longer be con-
sidered to be truly democratic if they affect the rights of ‘non-citizens’, that is, those
outside that community, without those people having a say. Held argues that, for
example, villagers in sub-Saharan Africa, who live at the margins of some of the
central power structures and hierarchies of the global order, are profoundly affected
by the policies made in these inter-state forums (Held, 1998, p. 14). Archibugi
stresses that the inequalities of global power relations mean that decisions demo-
cratically restricted to the nation-state can not be considered democratic from a
cosmopolitan perspective:
... few decisions made in one state are autonomous from those made
in others. A decision on the interest rate in Germany has significant
consequences for employment in Greece, Portugal and Italy. A state’s
decision to use nuclear energy has environmental consequences for the
citizens of neighbouring countries. Immigration policies in the European
Union have a significant impact on the economic development of
Mediterranean Africa. All this happens without the affected citizens
having a say in the matter (Archibugi, 1998, p. 204).
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