Imperfect Cosmopolis. Georg Cavallar
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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY NOW
Imperfect Cosmopolis
Studies in the History of
International Legal Theory
and Cosmopolitan Ideas
Georg Cavallar
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS • CARDIFF • 2011
© Georg Cavallar, 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to The University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-2367-0 (hardback)
978-0-7083-2382-3 (paperback)
e-ISBN 978-1-78316-459-2
The right of Georg Cavallar to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover design: Clifford Hayes Cover image: Grunge background © Duncan Walker/iStockphoto
Contents
3British Enlightenment: the Triumph of Commercial Cosmopolitanism
4Kant and the ‘Miserable Comforters’: Contractual Cosmopolitanism
5Late Eighteenth-century International Legal Theory: from Cosmopolis to the Idea of Europe
6Immigration, Rights and the Global Community: Pufendorf, Vattel, Bluntschli and Verdross
7Conclusion
Notes
Select Bibliography
This book grew out of several papers I delivered at various conferences over the last three years, and articles I published in different journals. Above all, I want to thank my wife Angelika for her almost stoic indifference when I was continuously absent-minded, especially during shared meals, conversations, and whenever she had something important to tell me. With kind amusement, she allowed me to work on this book which, in her opinion, has one major disadvantage: it is not going to make me rich. I am grateful to our children Clemens, Antonia and Valentina for tons of hugs, kisses, and laughter. The Stoics conceived humans as surrounded by a series of concentric circles, one of them being one’s immediate family. I realized the truth hidden in Edmund Burke’s famous statement that affections begin at home, and that we should not forget to ‘love the little platoon we belong to in society’, as it is ‘the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love … to mankind.’
I am indebted to many people for their help and continuous support, sometimes for years, especially to Sharon Anderson-Gold, Gideon Baker, Moritz Csáky, Lisa Ellis, Bardo Fassbender, Jörg Fisch, Pauline Kleingeld, Chris Laursen, Rebecka Lettevall, Herta Nagl-Docekal, August Reinisch, Karl-Heinz Ribisch, Garrett W. Sheldon and, above all, Howard Williams. I am grateful to University of Wales Press and their staff for their helpful and patient supervising of this book project.
Several chapters are based on previous papers and articles: Chapter 2 was published in the Journal of the History of International Law, 10 (2008), 181–209. Chapter 3 is a modified version of a paper delivered at a conference in Frankfurt am Main, and subsequently published in German. ‘Late eighteenth-century international legal theory’ grew out of a conference at Tours, October 2007. Chapter 6 is based on ‘Immigration and sovereignty. Normative approaches in the history of international legal theory (Pufendorf – Vattel – Bluntschli – Verdross)’, published in Austrian
Review of International and European Law, 11 (2006), 3–22, and presented at a conference in Tilburg, The Netherlands, May 2007.
I am fully aware of the fact that a book like this has its limitations. The range of publications I have consulted is limited, including only relevant ones in English and German. As English is not my native tongue, I should like to ask my readers’ forgiveness, still hoping that I have succeeded in presenting my ideas clearly and intelligibly in spite of this fact. In any case, I trust that this book is a convincing example of what in the first chapter I will call intellectual cosmopolitanism, and that my readers will be able to feel my fascination with the intellectually vibrant and fascinating eighteenth century.
It seems that ‘cosmopolitanism’ is the new buzzword of a new century. Several factors are usually mentioned which might have contributed to the reactivating of the concept: the end of the Cold War, a growing awareness of global risks such as climate change which cannot be dealt with at a national level, economic and cultural globalization, the new global terrorism, and the US ‘war on terror’ during the presidency of George W. Bush Jr. (2001–9). Others have stressed cultural or intellectual factors such as the rise of ethnocentric nationalism and liberal and/or leftist attempts to counter it, or a broad disappointment with theories of multiculturalism, universalism, economic globalization or pluralism.1
In particular, cosmopolitanism has been linked with the expansion and deepening of the European Union and Europeanization. Authors have expressed hopes of a ‘post-national, cosmopolitan form of loyalty’, or see the European Union as a transnational institution which might realize the principles of cosmopolitan democracy.2
The new buzzword has begun to mean or denote almost anything: the frequent traveller who is ‘critical’ towards her own country, the white Western male who considers nation-states outdated and nationalists retarded, the intellectual who has come to disdain the former buzzword ‘globalization’.3 John Cameron has found nine possible interpretations, from the global citizen to the cultural explorer.4 Others have added a range of adjectives to give an apparently flaky concept more substance or to refine it. We can read, among others, about ‘exclusionary cosmopolitanism’, ‘oppositional cosmopolitanism’, ‘eccentric cosmopolitanism’, ‘consumer cosmopolitanism’,