Seyla Benhabib

With the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the unification of Germany, and the extension of European Union to east and central European Countries, formerly under Communist rule, the Kantian cosmopolitan ideal of uniting diverse countries under the rule of law, respect for human rights and the free exchange of goods and services seemed to come alive. By the beginning of the new century, cosmopolitanism had fallen on hard times. As the optimism about the spread of international human rights law waned in the wake of the endless “wars against terror” and “humanitarian interventions”; as the many crises of the European Union led to disillusionment with the European project (Habermas), and democratization in eastern and central Europe stalled, giving rise to “illiberal democracies,” the exit of United Kingdom from the European Union in January 2020 put the nail in the coffin of cosmopolitan dreams. A slow and persistent rise of authoritarianism, not only in Hungary, Poland and Russia, but also in Turkey, Brazil, India and the United States began to unfold. The research project titled, “Demos, Cosmos and Globus,” and the Albert Hirschman lectures which will be based on it, will analyze first the populist critique of cosmopolitanism, focusing in particular on the development of “legal cosmopolitanism.” Both populists and liberal nationalists reject legal cosmopolitanism on the basis of a false conception of state sovereignty and thus misidentify the normative power of popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty today requires the embedding of the demos in a globus, anticipating a planetary ethic of interdependence.