Cosmopolitan citizenship

Abstract

Traditional statist approaches to citzenship emphasise the rights and duties which individuals have as members of bounded sovereign communities. They deny that citizenship has any meaning when detached from the sovereign nation‐state. Theorists in the Kantian tradition have used the idea of world citizenship to refer to obligations to care about the future of the whole human race. This article extends the Kantian approach by arguing for a dialogic conception of cosmopolitan citizenship. What distinguishes this approach is the claim that separate states and other actors have an obligation to give institutional expression to the idea of a universal communication community which reflects the heterogeneous character of international society.