I.

In what follows, I want to suggest that the proper response to the increasingly obvious limits of the modern polis, the modern sovereign state, is less to focus on claims about the cosmopolis than to think very seriously about what we can now mean when we talk about politics. My take on claims about cosmopolitan aspirations varies considerably, sometimes supportive, sometimes hostile, sometimes ambivalent, depending on contexts that are, after all, distinctly uneven. But my main concern here is that claims about cosmopolis tend to affirm a certain kind of answer to questions that still need to be articulated.

The key question, it seems to me, is AIf not the polis, then where and how can political life be?@ I don=t pretend to have any simple answer to this question. Indeed, what I take to be the most interesting and serious intellectual currents of our time tend to express a worried sense that no one has a very persuasive answer to this question, although there are also many people and institutions that would insist that the answer is so obvious that the question is entirely frivolous.

These remarks are thus intended to provoke discussion about how such a question might now be asked, and to explore something of what is at stake in asking it.

The obvious answer to this question hinges of the claims of the modern sovereign state, the polis writ large and inscribed in massive practices of territorial jurisdiction. I share with many people who are interested in various forms of cosmopolitan thinking the sense that this answer has only limited, though variable, plausibility in contemporary circumstances. But I think it is all too easy to make the leap from polis to cosmopolis. It is all too easy to assume that the addition of the cosmos conceived as a univeralizing alternative to the particularizing polis, might count as an alternative, a way forward, or out, or up.

Specifically, I want to argue here that it is a profound mistake to assume that cosmopolis can be an alternative to the polis without trying to come to terms with both their historical and structural complementarity; claims about the polis and claims about the cosmopolis have been mutually constitutive, and in many complex ways. We are dealing here with one of the great dualisms of modern life. We thus have to be careful neither to keep repeating the apparently polarized options as in some tedious tennis match, nor to pretend that we can easily escape or transcend these options.

In this context, I would say that:

II.

1. We are all in thrall to the polis, or at least to the ideal of the polis expressed in modern statist claims to political community and identity; to the community of blood that we call the nation and the community of law we engage as citizens. Some are content to declare or assume that this is what there is. All ontological, axiological and epistemological possibilities are delineated in the stroke of an assertion, in the sovereign act of discrimination and authorization.

Hobbes gave us what remains the most elegant modern account of how such an assertion might be achieved. Kant gave us an altogether smoother account of how it might be achieved once modern subjects learnt to rule themselves, to minimize politics and maximize ethics. The political economists and philosophers then taught us how to forget about what was involved in these declarations of modern possibility, these affirmations of the necessary freedom of the modern subject, allowing us to go looking for politics in the market, civil society, history, representation and the rest. Consequently, we now keep catching ourselves affirming the natural necessity of the modern polis by reproducing the state=s own self-affirming account of how it is both natural and necessary. Entire academic disciplines make their living from this ritual of affirmation.

2. Most would insist, of course, that this self-proclaimed natural necessity is an historical achievement, and perhaps even a rather fragile one at that. It is precisely this historical achievement that supposedly distinguishes us from those living in tribes and empires, even from those governed by despotic sovereigns rather than enlightened democrats.

Once historical contingency and diversity enter the analysis, opportunities for critique increase. Hobbes may have thought that the modern sovereign state, the re-reading of the polis cum republic as a timeless spatial fix for all contingencies, was the only option. Others may have thought his account could only be the beginning of a much longer story, whether of universalizing perfectability or nationalizing intensity. But in one form or another many have come to think that this is the problem to be overcome: that whatever its merits or its necessities, the polis can no longer be our political home; or at least our only political home. For whatever its upsides and freedoms, this home has brought us interstate wars and is at the source of many of our most intractable problems. Hobbes= gamble that the modern sovereign state, though undoubtedly dangerous, was the best of all possible alternatives, the only possible option one could freely chose in a modern world of supposedly free and equal individuals, has become much too risky. And in any case, many now insist, the claims of the modern state on either our multiple identities or our obligations are less and less persuasive as we engage with claims about globalization, human rights and all the rest.

3. This, of course, is what drives the contemporary interest in cosmopolitanism. But as many people have said, there are many cosmopolitanisms. There are many different ways of framing the legacy of the polis as the problem to be overcome through some kind of cosmopolitanism.

4. I believe the most common way of playing out this problem/historical analysis/solution is precisely the least useful. I believe it leads to a highly constrained reading of contemporary developments, offers an idealized reading of modern history, and above all reproduces a profoundly misleading account of the problem to which cosmopolitanism is said to be the solution.

5. There are a number of ways in which I could try to lay out this argument. Anyone familiar with my work will be aware that much of it is driven by a claim that the most important intellectual tradition in the theory of international relations is not realism, in any of its many forms, but idealism; an idealism that is sometimes Hobbesian, sometimes Hegelian but above all Kantian in character. The key figure here is probably Weber (though not the depoliticized Weber who still turns up as a paradigmatic sociologist), but modern political realisms are produced in relation to prior normative claims about an idealized modern state. One can play out similar difficulties in reading some of the key texts of modern politics. It is all too easy, for example, to read Plato=s Republic as an attempt to find a universalist solution to the problem of relativism personified by Thrasymachus, rather than to read this personification of all that is nasty about human affairs as a production of what must be the case given the specific articulation of universality, of Being as the ground or ideal from which to judge Becoming. It is even easier to read Hobbes= account of the social contract signed in a moment of ahistorical magic by modern free and equal subjects driven to a moment of synchronous rationality as a story of moving from the past to the present rather than as the projection of a specific account of the present onto a past, a past, of course that was subsequently discovered and framed both back in history and beyond the shores of rational Europe by all the familiar supporters of emancipatory reason: Locke, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill and on down to today. In this context it is especially interesting to engage with, say, the different interpretations of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan that, on the one hand treat the drawing of a modern line as the proper solution to premodern violence and, on the other, that treat the drawing of the modern line as precisely that which constitutes modern violence in the image of a state of nature.

I clearly tread on what some would take to be contentious territory here, but I don=t think its all that difficult to see that it is not entirely obvious that one has to start from the polis as an expression of fragmentation, of conflict, of difference, of international anarchy and all the rest. On the contrary, what we need to think about is the fragmentation of the polis not as a problem, at least not in the first instance, but as a solution to a problem of universality, a solution to the problem of cosmopolis if you will.

6. There are various ways in which one might elaborate this claim. It is a claim that one might read into various accounts of the modern world system, or the changing configuration of the relation of the modern state to several centuries of globalizing capitalism, or even to readings of the underlying cultural commonalities identified by claims about the society of states (associated among the theorists of international relations with the writings of Martin Wight and Hedley Bull). I want to take a different route, one that goes through various attempts to come to terms with the extraordinarily complex practice we call sovereignty, and its relationships with accounts of modern subjectivities, causalities and representations.

7. There are many ways of coming to terms with the spatiotemporal transformations that enabled a specifically modern world to challenge the prevailing empires and feudalisms of European Christiandom. In terms of fundamental principles, however, the story is relatively clear, and involved the gradual collapse of the Thomist or neo-Aristotelian account of a hierarchical subordination of earth to heaven, higher to lower, difference to unity: of what we now call the Great Chain of Being. This account was inherently problematic quite as much in terms of principle as of practice. Not least, there was the little matter of the radical dualism of earth and heaven, time and eternity, finite and infinite, that was fudged by a nice combination of faith and the angels congregating just beyond reach of infinity. The claims of a continuous (Aristotelian, Thomist) hierarchy were deeply in tension with the claims of a (Platonist, Augustinian) dualism. All the stereotypical moments of the rise of modernity B the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, nominalism, the modern sovereign state B involve an increasing primacy of dualism over hierarchical subordination. Consequently, these stereotypes tend to emphasise the radical difference between a world of premodern hierarchies and essentialisms and the modern world of subjects and objects. But this emphasis on the radical difference in the ways in which, say, the Thomists and the Galileans tried to respond to the question of the relationship between universality and diversity, or the finite and the infinite, or Being and Becoming, tends to obscure important continuities in the framing of the problem, which rested on a specifically Christian ontology of a transcendent God and a specifically Greek ontology of transcendent universals.

8. It is not entirely clear where one situates the moment at which the sway of an intrinsically unstable hierarchical resolution of the proper relation between universality and particularity gave way to the modern insistence on a world of free and equal subjects. One might say that in political terms at least, things become clearer sometime between Machiavelli and Hobbes. Machiavelli takes a stand for earth, or at least Florence, against heaven. Hobbes simply assumes that the world must conform to an abstract codification of free and equal individuals. But what we see in both cases is not some inane assertion of the way things are of the kind that have enabled half a century of textbook indoctrinations, but some quite profound struggles with a philosophical problem, a problem of the proper relationship between universality and particularity. And in general terms what we see is the usual story of a literally heroic attempt to find universality in particularity; the story of the emergence of the modern subject.

9. Crucially, this story of a relationship between universality and particularity was worked out within a very specific siteBEurope, modernity, the West or what have you B with a fairly well defined outside, one that might at some point be brought inside, whether as the colonized, the Third World, the undeveloped and so on.

10. To state the obvious, there was a specificity to this resolution of the relation between universality and diversity. Slightly less obviously, his resolution worked in relation to four key sites: the modern individual, the modern state, the modern states system and the rest of the world. Each of these four sites still provide our crucial boundary problems, difficulties of ensuring a clear line of demarcation between those subjectivities that have sustained our hope that unity and diversity can be resolved in a specific subject.

11. Two things need to be said about this resolution:

(i) it was a resolution of extraordinary elegance, with all the aesthetic economy that can be mustered from suturing the great chasm between the finite and the infinite in a line of zero width. Instead of a world we vaguely remember and castigate for worrying about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin, we have become used to a world that dances on razors, on the edge of the state, on the edge of the modern subject. This is the line that Hobbes turns into the magical instant in which we shift from mere nature (which he had already invented as a projection of modern subjectivities onto a space that was both out there and back then) to modern authority, thus giving authority to modern authority. This is the line that is expressed in Schmitt=s account of the sovereign that decides the difference between norm and exception. We know this line well, but only sometimes worry that there are no straight lines in nature. Hobbes= gamble on a groundless ground has more or less paid off.

(ii) it was a resolution that was always underachieved. The lines are never straight, never all in one place, never static; and the decision to draw them here or there is never uncontested. Machiavelli=s wonderful sense of the contingency of all politics has never been quite erased.

12. Once we latch onto the story of modern subjects, it is easy enough to be swept up not be the sheer elegance of this resolution of the competing claims of universality and particularity in a specific subject, the magical ambition for autonomous subjectivities strung out in territorial space, but in various narratives about the need to create order out of difference and diversity. Individuals are clearly multiple, competitive, fractious. Despite Hobbes insistence to the contrary, states seem much the same way. The states system is fractured and violent. Non-Moderns outside the civilizational centres are obviously barbaric. In all cases, the problem is multiplicity and the solution must be unity. But as the ambition for certain kinds of cosmopolis are mobilized to solve the problem of the polis, these ambitions countered by various claims that the modern polis is really the only option because it expresses the only plausible modern way of reconciling the equally plausible claims of both universality and diversity; thus Kant=s peace among republics, and Article 2 Paragraph 1 of the UN Charter.

13. Thus the power of Apolitical realism@ as it gets expressed in discourses about international relations derives not from its accurate portrayals of the way things are but from its normative insistence that modernity, modern subjects, modern states and so on are appropriately framed neither in terms of universality nor of multiplicity, but of a specific relationship between these competing claims (and thus the absurdity of reading Kant as the opposite of rather than the regulative ambition for political realism). It is a relationship that is ultimately resolved in an account of a subject that is at once multiple, specific, individual and (at least potentially) universal, human, rational. This is the story of our split identity as modern subjects, as beings that are in principle both particular (as citizens) and universal (as humans), with priority in the final political instance assigned to the former and priority in the final ethical instance assigned to the latter.

This split encompasses an affirmation of a middle ground; the priority mobilizes the desire for the trek from one polarity to the other.

14. In is in this context that one can see the limits of any attempt to work on the basis of a modern framing of an opposition between the polis and the cosmopolis. That opposition already defines the logic of the modern system of states, a system that is often described in a language of multiplicity (international anarchy and all that) but quite precisely expresses a specific account of the proper relationship between unity and diversity. This relationship, simply put, involves a single international system and many states B a system expressing varying claims to universality, whether in the name of Christiandom, Europe, modernity, (though of course it is still not clear whether places like Africa yet count as part of this singularity or not) and many states expressing specific cultures.

15. Now one might say that this observation is extraordinarily trite. Of course there is one system and many states. What else do theorists of international relations do for living? But one can make a number of important observations here, of which five are relevant to thinking about the topic at hand:

i. While it may be obvious that modern political life is constituted through a specific account of the relationship between universality and diversity, it is not so obvious that this is a very specific and in many ways quite odd account of how this relationship must be articulated. It is not, for example, organized through a logic of hierarchical subordination, though of course there are always suspicions that patterns of inequality threaten to take us away from a modern states system to some kind of empire. It is, rather, organized as a system of insides and outsides, the basic logic of modern subjectivity.

ii. This articulation is expressed by the modern principle of sovereignty which combines a re-reading of hierarchical authority, and the problematic relation of time and eternity, in the spatial codes of territorial geometry, the ungrounded ground from which to draw the line between both here and there and legitimate and illegitimate. Sovereignty is an extraordinarily complex practice, and it is certainly not adequately grasped as simply the expression either of the monopolistic authority of states or an expression of the fragmentation of the modern states system. The crucial issue here is not that sovereignty is going away B it is most certainly not B but that people are at last beginning to take it seriously as a concept, institution and practice that has to be explored far more extensively, not least so as to distinguish claims about sovereignty from its specifically modern expressions and groundings in space, time and identity.

iii. While it may be obvious that modern political life is constituted through a specific account of the relationship between universality and diversity, our major intellectual traditions encourage us to think in terms of either unity or diversity, depending primarily on whether they situate themselves to an inside or an outside.

This division of intellectual labour allows for some quite distinct readings of what cosmopolitanism might involve. Consider some of the more obvious sites from which one is often invited to think about cosmopolitanism:

b. from the city to cosmopolitan modernity

c. from a society to a world society, or from a culture to a world culture

d. from the state; the central axis of Ahere forever or gone tomorow@

Now I undoubtedly exaggerate to make a point here, but almost all of these sites are open to stories about a move from particular to universality; to work towards a critical engagement with political life at such sites is to work against the grain of such stories.

iv. these narratives are also entrenched in established academic disciplines (most especially sociology, political theory, economics, literature, and philosophy). I agree here with Ulrich Beck=s comments on methodological nationalism. But this is only one part of a complex problem of coming to terms with the ways in which the modern academy has been constructed on spatiotemporal terrain laid out by the modern sovereign state. There are the disciplines of the inside B paradigmatically political theory and sociology B and the disciplines of the outside B paradigmatically international relations (framed as the spatial negation of political theory) and anthropology (framed as the temporal negation of sociology). Other disciplines and their concepts can then shift in and out by shifting scale rather than negotiating the border; culture to global culture, economy to world economy and so on. Thus modern forms of knowledge are organized so as to tell the story of the grand trek to universality rather than the story of complementarity. They systematically obscure the extent to which modern politics is already framed as unity/particular. So the critique of methodological nationalism seem to me to require a critique of the ontological framing of a lot more than just methodology. The spatiotemporal framing of the sovereign authorizations of the modern state will have to be linked to the spatiotemporal authorizations that constitute the modern academy as well. Put differently, it is one thing to be aware of the nationalist character of modern sociology, but quite another to be aware of the nationalist character of modern political theory and all its concerns, though in recent practice lack of concerns, with questions about sovereign authorizations.

v. This is why I think it is possible to identify an interesting set of convergences between forms of critique emerging from (a) theories of international relations, (b) anthropology, and (c) at least some critiques of modern subjectivity; all areas in which questions about the political have been endlessly deferred, but in which the traditional forms of deferral have become increasingly suspect.

16. Thus we can think about cosmopolitanism from within modern codes. Thus one might point to the many different Kants that seem to be at work in various discussions of cosmopolitanism, not least the Kant stressing the internalization of universality within the autonomous individual, the Kant stressing the internalization of universality within democratic, or at least republican states, and the Kant who is sometimes imagined as a champion of world government. He can also be portrayed as a rather unpleasant figure, sustaining a parochial, and perhaps archetypically Eurocentric and sexist demand that the only way of reconciling universality and diversity is through the production of all humans as autonomous modern subjects. So, within these modern codes, there is at least plenty of opportunity for debate, though the terms of the debate do seem to me to be rather tedious.

17. But one can also try to think more clearly about how we have come to believe that the modern resolution of the relationship between universality and diversity must be articulated either in the polis or in some future cosmopolis. The key issue for me is not whether we should affirm one or the other, which is really a mug=s game anyway, but how we might think otherwise about the relationship between universality and diversity.

18. I would say that by now a few things are pretty clear:

a. We live in a world in which it is no longer very easy to assume that we can claim to resolve the relation between universality and diversity by drawing a sharp line between here and there, between inside and outside. What is at stake is not that states are becoming weaker, or that sovereignty is disappearing but that legitimate authority can no longer be contained within monolithic territorial boundaries, something that does have crucial implications for how we understand not only states and sovereignties but the very basic practices of distinction and discrimination that reproduce the sovereigntist practices of modern states.

b. If it is becoming more and more difficult to sustain lines of demarcation in horizontal territorial space, this does not imply some return to the kind of hierarchical great chain of being that seems to be so attractive to many cosmopolitan thinkers, especially in relation to interpretations of the European Community. It is as if they want to replace the dangers of a world of here and there with the dangers of a world of heaven and earth. Kant of course referred to the starry heavens above and all that; but it is pretty clear that the starry heavens are not above and that the whole metaphorical baggage of above, below, here and there is not a reliable guide to where we are today.

c. But there are other ways of thinking about lines, not least in terms of lines of connection. What we do see today is an extraordinary proliferation of connections, of relations, and networks. There are masses of literatures describing these, whether in relation to capital, cultures, communications, information social movements and so on.

d. There is even a burgeoning theoretical literature, one might sometimes say almost hyper-theoretical literature, working out all kinds of ways of thinking of a world of connections, networks, multiple subjectivities, speed and acceleration, and so on. If I am to make sense of contemporary claims about cosmopolitanism, globalization and so on, it seems to me that many of these literatures are quite crucial.

e. But, there is an extraordinary absence of thinking about politics; we have ethics and more ethics, governmentality, global civil society, global social movements, human rights, ngo=s, humanitarian interventions and so on, a more or less depoliticised discourse that seems content to wish politics away.

f. Nevertheless, people struggling to deal with difficult situations are of course forced to engage in politics, and to do so not on terms set by the official codes, but precisely by engaging in connections that literally relocate the political elsewhere.

g. These engagements seem to me to be crucial. Our futures lie neither with the polis nor with the cosmopolis, but with ongoing struggles to resituate and politicize sites of political authority. We already know that the old distinctions between global and local, or urban and rural, or north, south, east and west are being renegotiated very rapidly. These negotiations imply the need to renegotiate our understandings of both the polis and the cosmopolis. At this point, we need to be quite humble about the limits of our capacity to imagine what this might mean. We also need to be lot more empirically open to the diversity of things that are going on in the world. If cosmopolitanism is a name to be given to an openness to connections, to a sense that we all participate in various patterns of both commonality and diversity that are not and cannot be fixed by the lines inscribed by modern subjectivities, and which also insists on recognising the radically uneven developments and sites in which people struggle to on in the world, then I am all in favour of it. If it is just one more excuse for not thinking hard about politics B and it will be noted that I have purposefully not said exactly what I mean by this term precisely because I would prefer to underline its status as a question, and a practice rather than a given B then we can leave it to those moralists who already know where we must be going. That kind of cosmopolitanism is precisely what has to be resisted, and I think will be increasingly resisted as it becomes clearer and clearer that it bears little relation to what people have to do in order to relate, or change how they relate, to the world and to each other.

h. Sovereignties will proliferate and disaggregate rather than disappear, and the problem of sovereignty will become more intense. In this context, those discourses that depend on the constant opposition between polis and cosmopolis will seem increasingly absurd. Given the magnitude of the problems we face, this sense of absurdity cannot come soon enough.