The State and Cosmopolitan Responsibilities

Book excerpt: This book explores the role that states might play in promoting a cosmopolitan condition as an agent of cosmopolitanism rather than an obstacle to it. In doing so the book seeks to develop recent arguments in favour of locating cosmopolitan moral and political responsibility at the state level as either an alternative to, or a corollary of, cosmopolitanism as it is more commonly understood qua requiring transnational or global bearers of responsibility. As a result, the contributions in this volume see an on-going role for the state, but also its transformation, perhaps only partially, into a more cosmopolitan-minded institution -- instead of a purely 'national' or particularistic one. It therefore makes the case that the state as a form of political community can be reconciled with various form of cosmopolitan responsibility. In this way the book will address the question of how states, in the present, and in the future, can be better bearers of cosmopolitan responsibilities?