ABSTRACT
Contemporary writing on cosmopolitanism has argued that the social changes associated with globalisation require a new outlook which would recognise the permeability of national borders and challenge our conception of society as a nationally bounded entity. This chapter steps back from the detail of our case history and considers the role of judgement in more general terms, as a critical moment in bridging the gap between cosmopolitan ideals and a social reality which is much more conflictual. We see how the uncertain content of rights plays a key role in this process, revealing the dual nature of rights as both a social product and a social force. We earlier observed that Beck (2006) has identified three dimensions of a
‘cosmopolitan outlook’: the normative, the methodological, and the empirical. The normative content is captured by the notion of the ‘world citizen’ (Habermas, 2001) as indicative of membership in a world community fuelled by a cosmopolitan empathy and underpinned by the principles of universal human rights (cf Isin and Turner, 2007). The argument is not that the nationstate would be redundant in a new cosmopolitan order, but rather that it would occupy a critical position in the crafting of forms of belonging and entitlement through a set of binding co-operative procedures and global responsibilities, to foster a transformed consciousness of citizens (Habermas, 2001). For Fine (2007:39), however, this raises the question of:
How to understand the relation between cosmopolitanism as a transformative project and actually existing forms of political community.
