The Cosmopolitan Responsibilities of Republican States

Abstract

Can the republican state be a bearer of cosmopolitan responsibilities, and if so of what kind? In this chapter, I suggest that they must, but that these obligations will inevitably be constrained in kind. I reach this conclusion in two steps. First, I suggest that, unlike liberal egalitarians, republicans are all moral (if not necessarily all legal and political) cosmopolitans: they do believe that each and every moral agent is entitled to the same claim to non-domination. Yet, they sharply disagree on what it takes to secure this claim: are people best protected from domination if they live in robustly sovereign states, under a global democratic or constitutional regime, or does the solution lie somewhere in between? Second, I suggest that, if this is the case, then all republicans must recognize the existence of cosmopolitan responsibilities for states—even those who advocate the starkest forms of state sovereignty. For some of them, these responsibilities will include the obligation of states to subject themselves to supranational legal systems of some kind; for some, instead, they will only entail obligations to respect each other’s sovereignty. However, these responsibilities will have specific features regardless of such differences. In a nutshell: if, to some extent, the cosmopolitan responsibilities of states might entail the duty to intervene in, or interfere with, the conduct of other states, then these must be importantly constrained by the fact that these very interventions and interferences must themselves be of a non-dominating kind.