Keywords

1 Introduction

The academic philosophical discourse on cosmopolitanism, global (in)justice, global democracy and countless global (or even extra-terrestrial) challenges to humanity – in short, global political theory (Brooks, 2020; Held & Maffettone, 2017) – may leave the uninitiated wondering about its practical relevance. For no matter how inventive, well-argued or strongly motivated these scholarly contributions are, one can hardly miss their remoteness from what is realistically expectable in world politics. Take, for instance, Thomas Pogge’s well-known arguments on behalf of ‘minor reforms’ of international law as first steps towards eliminating global injustices. Pogge suggests abandoning certain privileges granted to governments of internationally recognised sovereign states, such as the right to use natural resources found in their territory as they see fit, the right to borrow money from abroad or the right to purchase arms for purposes of ‘self-defence’ (Pogge, 2005, p. 109, 2008, p. 119). On the one hand, Pogge’s appeal is realistic in the sense that it does not demand large-scale societal transformations – all we need, at least for starters, are a couple of tweaks in extant international law, plus, arguably, the annual global transfer of funds from the rich to the poor, a couple of hundred billion dollars, perhaps, to kick-start the eradication of world poverty (Pogge, 2010, p. 54). On the other hand, it is unlikely that the very actors in question – sovereign states, among them especially the great powers – will voluntarily saw off the branch they have been sitting on quite comfortably for decades. What, then, is there to say about ambitious cosmopolitan proposals which are part and parcel of the work of professional political philosophers, such as global equality of opportunity (Caney, 2005; Moellendorf, 2006), open borders (Carens, 2013) or global climate justice (Caney, 2020)? What is the point and purpose of academic normative theorising about world politics? The kind of scepticism voiced among others by Bohumil Doboš (see chapter “Cosmopolitan Visions Under the Critical Sight of Realist(ic) Geopolitics”) in part feeds off precisely such kind of practical concerns.

The present chapter generally assumes that this criticism may be based on a misconception about what cosmopolitanism, understood as a broad moral conviction grounding a varied set of approaches to political theorising about world politics, is meant to provide and achieve. My implicit point is thus that cosmopolitan political theorising has some value independent of whether it can offer decision-makers neat what-to-do checklists or whether it has an immediate response to the realist ‘objection from the existence of great powers’. Moreover, the idea of a responsible cosmopolitan state (henceforth also RCS) promises a fruitful middle ground between utopian theorising and acquiescence to the status quo. It does not follow that the RCS is the magic bullet that cosmopolitan theory can easily fire into political practice. I will, however, try to show that a perspective that is neither missionary nor thoroughgoingly sceptical is precisely the in-between approach that philosophical reflection on (world) politics should be looking for if it is to retain both a critical edge and practical relevance. Because the theorist’s point of view is necessarily different from that of the decision-maker, she might notice things which elude those acting in the line of duty. One of my partial goals in this chapter is to show how a set of practically oriented considerations related to responsible cosmopolitan states nevertheless invites more ambitious utopian theorising through the back door.

2 What Is the Point of Theorising About World Politics?

To better appreciate what contribution to political practice cosmopolitan theorists may be expected to provide, it is worth discussing what political theory is capable of providing in the first place. (1) For many (Rawls, 1999, pp. 136–137), it must aspire to identify the desired goals of political activity (what we ought [not] to strive for) and the corresponding criteria of the evaluation of such activity (which types of actions, structures or institutions are right/wrong, just/unjust etc.). Here, it is at its most utopian, not only envisioning what is the desired institutional framework but also criticising the status quo for not living up to the ideal. This goal-setting task often requires (2) conceptual investigation, that is, the clearing up of confusions about the meanings of basic political concepts and their relationship to political reality, as well as the justification of which of the competing interpretations of a given concept is preferable. Notions such as freedom, peace, justice, solidarity, security and universal prosperity would surely receive approval from all sides of the political spectrum, yet it is doubtful the meanings ascribed to them by the respective actors would be equivalent. The same goes for their opposites such as injustice or insecurity. At the very least, then, political theory helps to avoid talking past each other; in the best scenario, conceptual investigation discovers reasons to prefer one interpretation of a concept over others. (3) Clearing up the meanings of concepts facilitates thinking about specific institutional arrangements. These will still be idealised in the sense that although they are meant to orientate our actions in the real world, they do not constitute pieces of immediate political/policy advice. The idea of relational sovereignty which underpins the concept of the RCS could be understood as such a type of institutional arrangement.

(4) Somewhat less obviously, political theory might or might not be capable of recommending what we should do here and now. This is less obvious because this type of immediate practical advice requires incorporating at least some features of the current world which would arguably not be present in the idealised state of society as theorised under (1), (2) or (3) (such as poverty, exploitation, selfishness, power inequality, weakness of will and a host of other ‘bad facts’; cf. (Estlund, 2019)). Moreover, theorists offering such advice must be aware of the hard, factual constraints of political action, such as the widely diverging interests, preferences and identities of major players in global politics, or (less obviously) the dictates of international law (let me call these ‘constraining facts’). Accordingly, this approach requires a different type of knowledge than the kind political theorists usually possess; competence in matters of a great many social sciences, the humanities and possibly also the natural sciences may prove necessary for sound political advice.

It might be objected that the way political theorists understand their vocation is hardly relevant for practical politics. However, the struggle over meanings of words is central to both worlds. When the prime minister of an EU member state announced that the future would belong to illiberal, national democracy, as opposed to declining liberal democracy (Orbán, 2014), he probably had in mind particular images of what those notions stood for, and the fact that those images are still shared by many voters helps him stay in power (and alienate much of the rest of the EU). Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union states that the EU is based on the values of human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and so on; yet what these words entail is not quite clear.Footnote 1 Does ‘equality between women and men’ require legislated quotas on party candidate lists or even reserved seats in legislative bodies? What follows from the non-discrimination principle in matters of hiring? Does human dignity prohibit lending oneself to being tossed by other people for fun (and being paid handsomely for it)?Footnote 2 The related political action often takes intellectual inspiration from seemingly distant philosophical debates. As students of the history of political thought have amply demonstrated, it is through the reconceptualisation of basic elements of political language which are employed to describe and evaluate the social reality that political theory has participated in real-world social and political struggles (Skinner, 2002).

3 Toning Down Cosmopolitan Idealism: The Idea of a Responsible Cosmopolitan State

Moving from tasks (1) to (4) outlined in the previous section involves increasing attention to bad and/or constraining facts which accompany real-world political action.Footnote 3 Insofar as cosmopolitanism wants to be not only philosophically true but also practically useful, it needs to tone down its idealist pretensions and take seriously world politics as it is – including the persevering role of territorial states. This is the perennial lesson of political realism, whatever particular shape it acquires: ignoring how the world is, on behalf of narratives about how it should be, will likely result in misleading guidelines for political action.

Interestingly, the global scope of many looming threats and challenges has led many cosmopolitan political theorists to develop normatively highly ambitious visions of how global political institutions ought to be organised. A wealth of distinct models of different kinds have been devised by political theorists, to the effect that even the typologies of these positions do not overlap (Kuyper, 2015; Macdonald, 2017; Marchetti, 2012). For example, a lot of energy has been invested into exploring what democracy might mean and require beyond the state, ranging from the idea of a global demos (Valentini, 2014) through multi-level cosmopolitan citizenship (Archibugi, 2008) to functionally defined transnational demoi , basically a flexible set of stakeholders whose composition varies according to the issue at stake (Besson, 2009; Macdonald, 2008). Others are less enamoured with the prospects of democracy and invest their hopes in the cosmopolitan potential of international and/or supranational law, be it the pluralist, polycentric narrative (Krisch, 2010) or the integrative promise of global constitutionalism (Belov, 2018; Dunoff & Trachtman, 2009) . Still others believe in the legitimising capacity of supranational or global public reason, thus putting into use a central concept of much of contemporary philosophical thinking about legitimacy (Sadurski, 2015). Finally, output-oriented visions of the transnational cooperation of technocratic elites should be mentioned, due to their importance for thinking about the EU as the archetype of governing beyond the state (Majone, 1996; Scharpf, 1999).

Note that the ‘loser’ is almost always state sovereignty , together with national allegiances and the territorial demarcation of political communities. This is what makes such visions utopian, for they disregard the continuing capacity of states to alter the availability of such trajectories, not least by reclaiming sovereignty (think of Brexit), as well as the emotional patriotic bond cultivated by the states among their citizenries. In order to remain practically (politically) relevant for the here and now, cosmopolitan political theory must find a way of reconciling its moral ideals to world politics as it is. In other words, if it is to provide plausible and sound political guidelines, it needs to realistically come to terms with the continuing importance of territorial states for world politics. The recent turn in global political theory to the idea of a ‘responsible cosmopolitan state’ (Brown, 2011), ‘cosmopolitan responsible state’ (Beardsworth & Shapcott, 2019, pp. 8–9), or ‘statist cosmopolitanism’ (Ypi, 2008) is meant to achieve precisely that.Footnote 4 Upon suitable adjustments to their normative equipment, including foreign policy goals, states are potentially the primary agents of cosmopolitan political goals, even though they may be joined by a plethora of other actors, depending on the issue at hand and the resulting constellation of interests (‘stakes’) (Archibugi & Held, 2011; Ypi, 2012). The idea of an RCS is primarily aimed at smaller and mid-sized states which are not directly involved in great-power politics. As such, they can be expected to have more significant room for the incorporation of elements of cosmopolitan political morality and the corresponding practical goals in their behaviour in world politics.

The next two sections are devoted, first, to explaining how a political theory of RCSs may help deflect the neorealist geopolitical challenge and, second, to discussing certain blind spots of the concept of RCSs itself, as seen against the theoretical background outlined in the previous sections. I should emphasise that my own sympathies ultimately lie with a certain conception of a cosmopolitan state, even though I am probably less sanguine than most theorists sympathetic to the model about its immediate practical prospects (Dufek, 2013; Dufek & Mochtak, 2019). As in many other spheres of human activity, not all good things necessarily go together in world politics. At the same time, I see no reason to believe that good things can never happen in tandem, as Doboš’s (neo)realist geopolitics seems to imply (see chapter “Cosmopolitan Visions Under the Critical Sight of Realist(ic) Geopolitics”). As William Scheuerman (2011) has stressed, the realist tradition in international relations harbours much more progressive musings than the neorealist narrative wants to allow. One important motivation for this belief is the awareness of collective action problems to which I shall keep coming back.

4 RCSs Against Neorealist Reductionism

Combining the first three tasks of political thinking discussed in Sect. 2, global political theory may be said to be primarily concerned with the question of ‘how best to design the fundamental institutions through which political power is constituted, controlled and distributed within global society’ or ‘which existing such institutions are worthy of ongoing support, and on what basis’ (Macdonald, 2017, p. 76). These are, of course, normative questions, but that is hardly something to be ashamed of. When neorealist geopolitics offers political or policy advice, it does so on the basis of its own preferred normative criteria, these telling neorealist theorists which of the myriad of bare facts about world politics to prioritise or at least take into account. Neorealist geopolitics thus responds to the very same question as the most utopian of cosmopolitan visions; it just employs idiosyncratic standards with respect to what is a good or convincing answer. In the most general terms, these standards amount to peculiar interpretations of rational self-interest . The problem is not with self-interest as such, because the notion is an empty vessel which needs to be filled with content if it is to be analytically and/or normatively useful. The neorealist is right to the extent that cosmopolitan guidelines of political action are currently unlikely to be shared by the decisive actors of world politics. However, this is not an ontological or even anthropological fact: we know that the interests, preferences and identities of collective actors can and do change, so that what is deemed ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ by them changes accordingly. I do not think there is anything incredible about this claim; if there was, then constructivism would not be a thing in the study of international relations or elsewhere.Footnote 5

Accordingly, to claim that the conduct of states follows solely rational self-interest and imply that self-interest necessarily results in power conflicts is to overlook the modifying role played by norms. Prominent among them is international and/or supranational law, including rapidly expanding areas like human rights law, trade law and environmental law, as well as the more established ones (e.g. the law of the sea).Footnote 6 It is to be expected that outer space will also be increasingly covered by an ever denser network of international and/or supranational legal regulations, perhaps more overtly imbued with cosmopolitan intent. I am far from arguing that international law will solve the problem of power politics any time soon; that would certainly be naïve. At the same time, it would be a mistake to assume that international law which imposes on its subjects obligations which are in principle enforceable is completely inert with respect to the subjects’ conduct in world politics. International law in some form or other has accompanied inter-society relations since ancient times (Kingsbury & Straumann, 2010; Shaw, 2018, Chapter 1), which means that it has always provided an alternative normative framework of conduct to that of rational self-interest understood in the (neo)realist geopolitical way (i.e. as pertaining to actors who look solely for unilateral gains and benefits, judged against the background of a zero-sum view of world politics). Pointing out instances of states’ ignorance of international law on behalf of their selfish interests may ultimately undermine the sceptic’s position, because it is not difficult to identify instances of their submitting to the values embodied in international law in defiance of immediate unilateral gains (trade law is a textbook example here). At the very least, the very fact of the existence of impartial rules of conduct, which often entail penalties or punishments for noncompliance, becomes an input to the calculation of self-interested gains. Put more ambitiously, rather than merely ‘a simple set of rules’, international law may grow into ‘a culture in the broadest sense in that it constitutes a method of communicating claims, counter-claims, expectations and anticipations as well as providing a framework for assessing and prioritising such demands’ (Shaw, 2018, p. 67).

One core motivation for perceptiveness towards extra-statal sources of norms of conduct is the realisation that the sustenance of state capacities themselves is preconditioned by events which take place beyond state borders. The institutional structure of which international law is a central part renders these events at least partly predictable, allowing individual actors to adjust to expected scenarios.Footnote 7 Perhaps even more importantly, shared rules of conduct allow for more effective coordination in cases where collective action is required. In particular, if there is disagreement about the required, permitted or prohibited course of action, and if the action that is permitted or required cannot be pursued unilaterally if the given goals are to be achieved, impersonal rules may greatly help coordinate on an effective response. Climate change and the threat of asteroid impact are paradigmatic examples of existential import; for many states, however, more ‘mundane’ issues such as mass migration, rules of world trade, intellectual property rights or the impact of global financial transactions raise more immediate concerns.

If a positive impact is to be achieved, then international law obviously requires that the most powerful actors accept it as authoritative and take seriously the resulting duties and limitations on unilateral conduct that it imposes – in other words, international law needs to enjoy sociological legitimacy. Rejecting that this is how things work in world politics represents another piece of the neorealist geopolitical challenge. However, scholars of neither international law nor world politics unanimously share this scepticism. It might be the case that less powerful or outright weak states have more direct interest in there being external constraints on the conduct of the powerful,Footnote 8 which again renders weaker states as primary candidates for the role of agents of cosmopolitan political morality . Whether great powers share this interest or not is a contingent rather than conceptual matter. Accordingly, the cosmopolitan argument is that collective action problems arising from empirical realities of the twenty-first century increasingly put great powers under pressure to accept such self-imposed constraints and comply with them.

5 Pitfalls of Bringing the State Back in Global Political Theory

Some political theorists have insisted that states as we know them – territorially based, claiming jurisdiction over their territory, bonded by common feelings (of nationality or otherwise) – need to remain the primary actors of world politics as well as the central subject matter of political theorising, at least for the foreseeable future. However, there is a decisive difference between, on the one hand, the work of John Rawls (1999), David Miller (2007), Michael Walzer (1994), Robert Dahl (1999), Michael Blake (Blake, 2013a) and others and the concept of a responsible cosmopolitan state on the other, in that the former never construed states as primarily efficient means to achieving cosmopolitan (non-statist) goals. It might ultimately be true that even the former are susceptible to the cosmopolitan label, insofar as the moral egalitarian plateau which Western political theory has almost universally accepted implies that ‘we are all cosmopolitans now’ (Blake, 2013b; Kymlicka, 2002, pp. 2–3). While the positions of Rawls et al. are normally labelled as ‘statist’ or ‘nationalist’ to mark their opposition to cosmopolitan political theory (Brock, 2009; Hutchings, 1999), their theories do indeed incorporate fundamental elements of universal (= cosmopolitan) moral concern such as the importance of basic human needs or rejection of economic exploitation between countries.Footnote 9 But their ‘cosmopolitanism’ is reluctant and mostly forms an appendage to essentially particularistic normative-political visions.

In contrast, for RCSs, cosmopolitan values, principles, and goals are paramount, with cosmopolitan states taking up the role of the foremost agents of cosmopolitan morality. The suggestion that states could become the flagbearers of ideals which seemingly contradict the nature of sovereign stateness indeed represents a major change of focus in a literature which used to rather begrudgingly accept the state as an unfortunate remnant of a particularistic past, one which needs to be dealt with by non-ideal theory. I count myself among those who applaud the shift in focus, for any political theory which aims to guide political action needs to accommodate, in a non-ad hoc manner, the actor around whom the current architecture of the world order has been erected. However, even though this is a move in the right theoretical direction, certain questions linger which indicate that there is still a lot of work ahead for both cosmopolitan theory and practice. In the remainder of this section, I discuss two such issue areas: the motivational plausibility of the RCS model and the kind of reconceptualisation of sovereignty the model officially requires. In the concluding section, I explain why RCSs represent, in my view, a transition stage on the route towards global political authority.

5.1 Motivational Issues

The trouble with reasonably functioning democratic countries is that decision-makers qua political representatives are normally expected to be sufficiently (if not fully) responsive to the interests, preferences, identities etc. of those they represent – that is, the citizenry at large or some subset thereof. Also, they are normally held accountable for their actions by those represented, via elections or otherwise. The problem should be obvious: all the talk about cosmopolitan sentiments, responsibilities or duties of states may quickly hit a wall of self-regarding demands and preferences on the part of the citizenry. Suppose one such cosmopolitan duty concerned the accommodation of migrants from poor countries, theorised by some cosmopolitans as a part of the topic of global (in) justice (Carens, 2013). It seems likely that any government which significantly opened its borders in compliance with these moral ideals (think of EU-type ‘redistributive’ immigration policies on steroids) would face a backlash from citizens. Brexit could also be construed as an example of a momentous domestically driven political decision which rejected the bindingness of cosmopolitan values and universal responsibility upon which the EU’s identity supposedly rests (Beck & Grande, 2004).Footnote 10 The crucial point, however, is that governments which disregarded the will of the country’s citizens would, as governments of democratic countries, be acting illegitimately.Footnote 11

The more ambitious the cosmopolitan goals are, the less likely it is that democratic countries will be able to play their part on the basis of their internal motivational resources. Also, the more likely it is that these goals, as translated into policy priorities, will trigger a backlash of particularistic sentiments which are still deeply embedded among citizens: they are ‘felt and lived rather than learnt’ (Ulaş, 2017, p. 666 emphasis in original) or theorised. On the face of it, the RCS vision cannot do without the systematic, intensive cosmopolitan education of citizens. But we know that the EU itself struggles with creating the kind of shared identity which would ensure pan-European loyalty and solidarity even in times of crises. Yet the centralisation – here, Europeanisation – of school curricula remains a highly sensitive topic among EU member states, seemingly infeasible in the short and mid-term. Although there might be objective moral and factual reasons for wanting to go the RCS route, this is still quite remote from citizens internalising these reasons so that they inform and direct their deliberations and decisions on difficult political topics. In more technical terms, justifying reasons are not necessarily also motivating reasons , which constitutes a problem for non-ideal theory aiming to guide us here and now (Alvarez, 2020). At the very least, cosmopolitan education is a lengthy process with delayed payoffs. Any state which aspires to set the avant-garde cosmopolitan pace and wants to remain a democracy needs to grapple with the challenge of adequate education, preferably in some level of coordination with other similarly minded actors.

5.2 Which Sovereignty?

It might be objected that while I show some sensitivity to variations in the globalist position and the numerous novel conceptions of democracy which accompany global democratic visions, I do little justice to what the notion of a ‘sovereign state’ might stand for. Indeed, up to now I have been rather silent about the conceptual background of a responsible cosmopolitan state . Sovereignty understood as the highest, ultimate, supreme authority in a given realm (usually the territory of a state) has long been the bogeyman of not only cosmopolitan political thought. As such, it has been accordingly either roundly rejected (Arendt, 1961, p. 163; Maritain, 1951, pp. 49–53) or variously disaggregated and retheorised so that it could become compatible with cosmopolitan goals without the need for a simultaneous global replication of sovereign stateness (Caney, 2005, Chapter 5; Keating, 2001). In international legal and political practice, a counterpart development resulted in the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) at the beginning of the new millennium, which is often understood as opening a new chapter in the history of state sovereignty (Evans, 2008; Orford, 2011). Also, the political trajectory of the European Union has been hailed as evidence of the viability of a post-sovereign (post-national, post-statist) political order in which sovereignty still has its place, albeit in a dispersed, pooled, relational etc. form (Beardsworth & Shapcott, 2019; Habermas, 1998; Pogge, 1992).

However, post-sovereign approaches to sovereignty rest on a misconception about what the point of the concept is. Cosmopolitans tend to equate sovereignty with state sovereignty and argue that in its ‘traditional’ form, it is neither empirically adequate as a description of the current realities of the globalised world nor morally sustainable once balanced against cosmopolitan ideals such as human rights or global justice. But such a construal of sovereignty takes the concept as representing some quantifiable good that real-world entities such as states may possess in different degrees. The quality of ‘being sovereign’ would then imply both exclusive possession of the good inwards (‘internal sovereignty’) and the unconstrained ability to express and perhaps realise state goals outwards (‘external sovereignty’). This understandably triggers both descriptive and normative criticism of the concept of sovereignty. But the victory comes cheap, as none of the assumptions are conceptually necessary. Sovereignty neither describes or requires empirically or morally unconstrained action, nor represents a good that can be variously added to, subtracted from or distributed among actors, nor pertains exclusively to states. But I do not follow those who speak about different types of sovereignty either (Krasner, 1999). Rather, I suggest understanding the concept as capturing a particularly modern way of allocating the authority to set up binding criteria of right and wrong political action, of desirable and undesirable political goals (Belling, 2019). Under this construal, sovereignty presupposes a subject which articulates the desired criteria. This is why the concept of sovereignty has been so amenable to democratic interpretations, which in turn renders the idea of popular sovereignty among the core defining elements of democratic political rule. Precisely because a democratic people is sovereign, it can give unto itself the basic rules of social cooperation (i.e. the constitution, in liberal democracies at least).

Seen from this angle, calls for a dispersion of sovereignty away from the state level leave political theory with few options, because we still need to identify the subject of sovereignty. (A) Insofar as cosmopolitan values, principles and goals are to be retained, one possibility is to accept the normative superiority of a cosmopolitan moral order which precedes the existence of individual political units and largely determines the criteria of right and wrong political action. Since the mid-twentieth century, the prominent expression of such higher order has been human rights , which are usually networked to a host of further cosmopolitan ideals such as fair treatment or equality of opportunity. However, human rights never come into the human world as some unchangeable eidos. Even as positivised international human rights (Alston & Goodman, 2013; Donnelly, 2013), they need to be interpreted: that is, their meaning and content have to be specified and applied to particular cases. For our present purposes, this means that whoever provides an authoritative interpretation of human rights becomes the sovereign in the realm of human rights and, by extension, in any realm where human rights themselves are supposed to possess supreme normative authority.Footnote 12 (B) The other option is to supplement the ‘cosmopolitisation’ of political morality with an analogous move on the demos side, so that the link between legitimacy and democracy remains strong. This is where philosophical attempts to substantiate the possibility (or even current existence) of a global demos find their sweet spot, for they help maintain the link between cosmopolitan moral goals and a global subject which is supposed to articulate them.

Nonetheless it should be clear that whichever conception of democratic subjectivity is ultimately preferred, it will not be easily incompatible with the idea of a responsible cosmopolitan state – for the simple reason that the point of cosmopolitan political morality is to move away from the state level as the decisive locus of authority. What matters, then, is that RCSs are required to become cosmopolitan states, rather than them remaining as cosmopolitan states. This means that they would become primarily accountable to guardians of cosmopolitan goals and values, rather than directly the wishes and demands of their citizens. In turn, the motivation problem kicks in again. It seems to me that a possible way out is to reduce the normative expectations placed on the shoulders of RCSs, that is, to admit a healthy dose of non-utopianism (realism, if you wish) into cosmopolitan political morality, as discussed in Sect. 3.

6 Conclusion: Responsible Cosmopolitan States as a Transitional Stage

Assuming we are aware of the obstacles discussed in the previous section, and accordingly avoid overloading RCSs with unrealistic expectations, small and mid-sized states may indeed become key agents of a different future for humankind. There is a strong constructivist element in this vision, because it takes as granted the malleability of actors in world politics (Dufek, 2013, p. 204). The idea of an RCS can then inform reflection on further salient questions of world politics, such as possible ways of improving legitimacy in various areas of governance beyond state borders. Frameworks of decision-making regarding the space-policy challenges of orbital debris removal, planetary defence against asteroid and comet impact and space exploration and the exploitation of space resources – an area where advanced science and politics inevitably meet – are one such fruitful area of research (Boháček et al., 2021). But it is crucial not to lose track of the larger cosmopolitan goals which transcend the individual political strategies of a few countries. As students, analysts and theorists of world politics, we cannot but remain at least partly utopian (idealistic) in an important sense which I want to specify in this concluding section.

The cosmopolitan ideal certainly does not consist in a bunch of lesser actors engaging in a progressive yet ultimately futile sideshow. There must be the aspiration to make international law truly cosmopolitan and to turn over strongly self-regarding great powers to the party of the good. At the very least, the future of humanity must be envisioned by cosmopolitans as one inhabited by political bodies that are in their majority aware of their cosmopolitan responsibilities/duties and willing to discharge these duties, as well as assisted in this by enforceable legal or political norms. In short, the ideal points to a kind of system of responsible cosmopolitan states which perseveres over time and does not fall prey to purely self-regarding adventures of a random great power.

If we are after such robustness, however, then a host of intriguing questions about the shape of such a system arise. Suppose for the sake of argument that cosmopolitan innovators are, within some reasonable timeframe, successful in diffusing their values and motivations across the globe, so that the desired cosmopolitan norms have been internalised by a great many actors. It is plausible to assume that the problem of collective action, especially as regards the provision of public goods and the related threat of free riding, will thus have been mostly solved (Gaus, 2008, pp. 84, 102). Nonetheless, there are practical/pragmatic reasons why a world populated by responsible cosmopolitan states remains vulnerable to a tilt towards a world state. For one, the transactional costs of exchanging and pooling knowledge and executive capacities among formally independent actors who otherwise share the same set of cosmopolitan values and goals come as unnecessary and even counterproductive, when compared to the globally centralised alternative (Ulaş, 2017, p. 667). Moreover, types of action which require concerted effort on the part of many parties – the bundle of climate change goals representing a fitting example – seem to call for the deliberate creation of a centralised coordinating authority, so that at least a part of the epistemic, administrative and enforcement burden can be shifted to another agent.

The idea of a centralised global political authority with legitimate coercive power usually brings disquiet to political theorists. Accordingly, one major motivation behind the sophisticated visions of global political rule mentioned in Sect. 3 is precisely to avoid the world-statist spectre, which seems to threaten global despotism, global paternalism and other bad stuff. I have argued in earlier texts that as long as such cosmopolitan normative visions are morally highly ambitious, the world-statist alternative seems practically more robust and conceptually more consistent than numerous multi-level visions of global rule (Dufek, 2013, 2019; Scheuerman, 2011, 2014). It is worth noting that besides normative reasons (Cabrera, 2004; Ypi, 2013), also certain empirical trends and fairly uncontroversial assumptions about the nature of the actors of world politics have been cited by proponents of the world-statist alternative. For example, legal theorist Joel Trachtman argues that because of the increasing density and scope of international law, international organisations will gradually take up and perform governmental functions. Functional necessities arising from globalisation and transnationalisation render such development ‘necessary’ in Trachtman’s view, which is why he thinks that ‘the future of international law is global government’ (Trachtman, 2013, p. 3).Footnote 13

I am not trying to make a prediction about the future à la Trachtman or Wendt. My point is more modest and takes us back to the roles political theory can play, as discussed in Sect. 2. Earlier I pointed out that the idea of a responsible cosmopolitan state allows political theorists to keep providing normative guidelines while staying in close touch with present-day political realities. As it turns out, however, there are reasons to believe that, normatively speaking, an RCS is mainly a transitional stage towards a globally centralised political authority, rather than an end in itself. After all, RCSs need to tie their foreign policy to some set of criteria which transcend the bare facticity of world politics. Even though it might be found awkward as regards the provision of useful policy/political advice here and now, (cosmopolitan) political theory remains unmatched in the task of exploring the limits of the politically possible. If what I say here holds water, then the ‘practical’ idea of a responsible cosmopolitan state inevitably contains the seeds of highly utopian political thinking.