Between Neoliberal Crisis and the Return of Great Power War: Reflecting on a Postcosmopolitan Decade

Cosmopolitanism did not fade out entirely following the Great Recession, but the anti-statist Zeitgeist that pervaded the 1990s and early 2000s chilled considerably. The onset of capitalist crisis, coupled with the demands for austerity by supranational institutions, brought a renewed wave of suspicion over whether cosmopolitanism harbored true emancipatory potentials or was merely a fig leaf for unbridled neoliberalism and neoimperialism. Figures on both the left and the right extolled the virtues of state sovereignty as the only viable mechanism for ensuring political, social, and economic security for citizens—however differently they may have interpreted the tasks of sovereign control. I argue the recent outbreak of war in Europe allows us to call attention to the faults in this reasoning, and to illustrate that salvation from global capital is not to be found in the sovereign territorial state. Despite the relative absence of great power wars in recent decades, the Westphalian state system is intrinsically violent in a way that commits it to extraction in the service of capital accumulation. While it is true that recent cosmopolitan ideas have proven themselves susceptible to neoliberal appropriation, the sovereign state is equally if not more prone to being a tool of capitalist exploitation and expropriation in the service of war, imperialism, and Great Power politics. Instead, we need to more sharply distinguish between two strands of cosmopolitan thinking and the agendas they espouse. “Negative cosmopolitanism” conceives cosmopolitanism as the increase of negative freedom within and across borders. Embodied in such institutions as the UNSC, WTO, and the current version of the EU, this version is more likely to welcome any decrease in Westphalian state power, so long as the supranational institutions that replace it remain weak or undemocratized. “Positive cosmopolitanism,” in contrast, is to be understood in terms of the increase of nondomination, if not positive freedom. It is embodied in the figures of the refugee, the economic migrant, and the Southern laborer for the Northern multinational, and it strives for the elimination of oppression between and across as well as within states. Though we have always been aware of these different sets of priorities, cosmopolitan theorists have not been consistent in thinking through how normative schemes might support one over the other.