ABSTRACT
Instead of summarizing the ongoing lively debate on cosmopolitanism, I will start by quoting and commenting on a single sentence, admittedly a complicated one, from Immanuel Kant’s seminal text Zum ewigen Frieden (Perpetual Peace), first published in 1795.1 This sentence forms the concluding paragraph of the commentary to the “third [and last] definitive article
for a perpetual peace” (which is followed only by two supplements and two appendixes) and runs as follows:
Since it has now come so far with the constantly increasing (narrower or wider) community of the peoples of the earth that a violation of rights in one place of the earth is felt in all places: so the idea of a law of world citizenship [world citizen right] is no phantastic and overstrung notion of the right, but a necessary supplement to the unwritten code of both civil and inter-national law [right of peoples] for the public human rights in general, and hence for perpetual peace which to continually approaching one can flatter oneself only under this condition.2
