1998 Realism vs Cosmopolitanism

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Realism Vs CosmopolitanismAuthor(s): Barry Buzan, David Held and Anthony McGrewReviewed work(s):Source: Review of International Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Jul., 1998), pp. 387-398Published by: Cambridge University Press

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Review of International Studies (1998), 24, 387-398 Copyright ? British International Studies Association

Realism vs cosmopolitanism*

A DEBATE BETWEEN BARRY BUZAN AND DAVID HELD,CONDUCTED BY ANTHONY McGREW

A.Mc. A common preoccupation of much contemporary writing about world

politics

concerns thedynamic

interrelation betweencontinuity

and

change.

The end

of the Cold War, the intensification of globalization and the 'postmodern turn' have

delivered powerful challenges to the orthodoxy of realism. Among the most

significant of these challenges is the cosmopolitan approach advocated by David

Held, Andrew Linklater and others. In contradistinction to realism, which assumes a

strict analytical separation between politics within and amongst states, the

cosmopolitan approach proffers a more unified conception of political life. In this

discussion Barry Buzan, a prominent advocate of realism, and David Held debate

the merits of their respective positions and assess the strengths and limits of both

realism and cosmopolitanism as frameworks for understanding contemporary global

politicsand its

potentialfor transformation. I

began by asking Barryto

explainthe

fundamentals of contemporary realism. What are its constituent elements?

B.B. The key thing about realism is that it is a political theory and you need to

understand that first and foremost. The titles of the two best-known realist texts

make this very clear: Morgenthau's Politics among Nations and Waltz's Theory of

International Politics. Realism gives you a particular angle on the world system, but

it is a limited angle, focused on power politics. Now there is, of course, a problem

about how we define 'power' and there are lots of different approaches to that, most

of which can be comfortably contained within realism in one way or another. Power

might be about the capabilities of units to do things, or about the relative strengths

of different units compared to each other, or about, tosome

extent, the interests ofthese units and the way they define them; itmight also be about structural power,

the way inwhich the system itself?that is, the arrangement of the system?actually

shapes the behaviour of units within it. Power can be located in the structure of the

system. But realism for the most part is interested in the units; even when it thinks

about system structure it does so in terms of the units. And it is very much fixated

on the state because the state is, of course, the key political unit in the international

system. Hence, realism is a political theory; it is a theory of the state.

Realism is a theory that divides the globe into two different domains. There is the

domain inside the state which is often seen as progressive, where politics operates

and where society can evolve; and there is a domain outside the state or betweenstates?the international relations domain?which is not seen as progressive but as

*This discussion was recorded in December 1996 by the BBC for the Open University course,

D316, Democracy: From Classical Times to the Present. It has been adapted and extended for

publication.

387







388 Barry Buzan et al.

static. This is the domain in which power politics works, has always worked and, in

the view of avery

committedrealist,

willalways

work. So that aslong

as the inter

national system is divided into states, the relations between states will have this

characteristic of being about power politics.

A.Mc. When you talk about power politics, what are you talking about exactly?

B.B. I am emphasizing a conflictual view of the international system. Realism

assumes that states are all locked into their own survival and into the pursuit of

their own interests, that those interests will clash at various times and places and for

various reasons, and that because there is no overarching government in the system,

then the use of force is always a possibility in the conduct of states toward each

other. Power in the realist view, therefore, does have a strong military component. I

do not think realism is necessarily wedded to this, but traditionally power and themilitary have been closely associated in realism because the international system is

unmediated by any kind of global authority. In pursuit of their own interests, or in

defence of their own interests, states may resort to force in relation to each other,

and force is a kind of ultimate test of power.

A.Mc. Is this why sovereignty is so central to the realist view of the world?

B.B. Sovereignty is central because it defines what the state is. The idea of

sovereignty, as I understand it, is the claim to exclusive self-government, which

means that the state is defined in terms of its ability to exert absolute political

authority over a given territory and people. This is not the way in which the inter

national system has always been organized; it is the modern European way of

organizing politically which was imposed on the rest of the world as a condition of

decolonization. The European powers left behind them a world remade in their own

political image in terms of sovereign states. Thus, sovereignty is what makes a very

hard and sharp political distinction between the domestic domain inside states, and

the domain of relations between states.

A.Mc. Let me come to you now, David. In the cosmopolitan account the separa

tion of the domestic and external spheres no longer seems sacrosanct, especially so

in an age of intense globalization. Is this your view?

D.H. I think 'the division' is certainly called into question. But I am in agreement with a great deal of what Barry has said. The realist focus on political power

has been extremely important in illuminating the dynamic relations between states,

the nature of the growth in relations among states, and the centrality of war in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After all, the twentieth century, despite all its

claims to civilization, has been one of the most violent of all centuries, if not the

most violent. But the perspective I take, the 'cosmopolitan perspective' for the

purposes of the discussion, highlights a number of key things. One is that the single

minded focus on political power and the state, which is so much at the centre of

realism, is insufficient to examine the complexity of the world inwhich we live.What

the cosmopolitan perspective says is that if power is important, and it indeed is, it isto be found not just in relations within states and among states, but across other

dimensions of social life as well. So I would say that an account of the structure of

power must be a multidimensional account, looking at economic phenomena, poli

tical phenomena, social phenomena, technological phenomena, cultural phenomena,

and so on. One finds power, power systems and power conflicts in all these realms.

Contra realism, I would argue that state power is but one (albeit important)







Realism vs cosmopolitanism 389

dimension of power; and that aspects of all of these dimensions need to be

understood if the nature andprospects

of statepolitics

are themselves to begrasped

satisfactorily.

A.Mc. How does this multidimensional account of power relate to the

importance cosmopolitans, like yourself, attach to globalization. Is globalization

transforming the state and state power?

D.H. The issue of globalization does raise particular questions about political

power and nation-states. On the one hand, many people claim we live in a global

world. I call these the 'hyperglobalizers', who assert that the nation-state is no longer

central to the modern world: it is displaced; it is locked into a variety of complex

processes; its power is denuded by world markets, by the growth of regions, by

changing structures of international law, by environmental processes, andso on.

Ithink this view exaggerates the nature of the global changes with which we live. We

live at a moment that can indeed be characterized as 'a global age', but the hyper

globalizers have misunderstood the nature of this age. On the other hand, there are

those who think that nothing fundamentally has changed for the last- hundred years,

that the world is no more international than it was, for example, during the gold

standard era, and that the relations between states are, in some senses, less complex

than they were during the British Empire. After all, the British Empire was an

extraordinary political system which stretched across many regions and territories of

the world. I think this sceptical view is also wrong, but, in order to tell you why, I

ought to say something briefly about what globalization is and about the view that Itake of it.

For me globalization involves a shift in the spatial form of human organization

and activity to transcontinental or interregional patterns of activity, interaction and

the exercise of power. It is not a case of saying there was no globalization, there is

now. Rather, it is a case of saying we can examine and distinguish different historical

forms of globalization in terms of the extensity of networks of social relations and

connections, the intensity of the flows and links within these networks, and the

impact of these phenomena on particular communities. (In making these dis

tinctions I am deploying concepts colleagues and I have been developing in research

on globalization for some time.)1 I believe if you trace out within this framework the

changing structure of trade, finance and multinational corporations, to take just

three phenomena, you can show how in the late twentieth century we live in a world

inwhich states are more enmeshed in global processes and flows than they have ever

been before. Political power, in other words, is being repositioned, recontextualized

and, to a degree, transformed by the growing importance of other (less territorially

based) power systems.

A.Mc. Does this cosmopolitan account deliver a fundamental challenge to realist

notions of political power and the centrality of the sovereign state inworld politics?

B.B. Well, it raises very interesting questions and I think it goes back to theinitial caveat that Imade when talking about realism: that it is a political theory.

Being a purely political theory it is stuck inside a relatively narrow domain. Accord

ingly, much of what David has said I can agree with, because if you are thinking in

1See David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformation: Politics, Economics and Culture,

(Cambridge, 1998).








realist terms the problem is that the boundary around the state?that which

separatesthe inside from the outside?has been cut

through bya whole load of

things, by communication, by trade, and by finance in particular. These are things

which realists are not all that well equipped to think about. So what you find is that

the political/military sector, as I would call it, which realist theory largely focuses

upon, has become a bit less important in relation to what is going on in the world, at

least for some states. I'll have more to say about that later. In relation to the

emergence of a world economy, and to some extent the development of a world

society, and even in terms of transportation and communication systems, it is clearly

naive now to think of a world made up of sovereign states which 'contain'

everything.

In traditional realist thinking, and also historically, therewas some

validityto

theview that the state did contain an economy and society. The idea of a nation-state

presupposes that the state embraces a particular society and a particular culture.

Mercantilism presupposed that a society contained more or less its own economy,

although there may be some trade. Now, all of these assumptions are rather falling

away because the economy is clearly becoming globalized. Very few, if any, states

now have any pretence at all to autarky or a self-contained economy. And although

many societies still wish to preserve their own identity and use the state to do this,

there ismore exchange, more migration, more 'multiculturalism' in some senses, and

elements of an emergent world society. There are questions to be asked about all of

these things, and the problem is they fall a little outside realist theory because realist

theory focuses on the state, and all of these other things are happening, as itwere,

elsewhere. To put the point somewhat differently: it is not so much that I think that

realism iswrong; it is a mistake to assume that the state is disappearing. The state is

still there, and to some extent, therefore, the realist logic still applies. But other

things have become more important and one has to judge realism in relation to the

importanceof these other areas.

A.Mc. Can realism accommodate this changing world?

B.B. Yes and no. I think that in those parts of the world where the old model of

the relatively closed, sealed state has faded away, a good part of realist theory no

longer tells us very much. Imean if states have become as interconnected as, say, themembers of the European Union, just what is the boundary between the 'domestic'

and 'international'? A lot of EU politics feels more like domestic than international

politics, and in that sense the whole realist model is hard put to deal with that kind

of development. Where states have become very open and interdependent, then

some of the realist theorizing about the balance of power (and all that) is clearly less

relevant. In such circumstances, thinking about states in terms of traditional power

politics is unhelpful. But my sense is that the whole world is not going that way.

There are plenty of parts of the world in which the realist rules of the game still

apply. If you look at, say, relations in East Asia, if you think about the way inwhich

China and Taiwan relate, or North and South Korea, or indeed Japan to both Chinaand the Koreas, this has an awful lot still of the flavour of realism about it.

Accordingly, I think it would be a mistake to assume that the whole world has

reformed itself in the same way that the most advanced parts of the world have. My

view is that the world is really divided into two or three spheres inwhich the rules of

the game are quite different because the level of globalization is very differently

distributed.








A.Mc. Can I return to you, David? In the light of Barry's defence of realism,

shouldglobalization

be understoodprimarily

as aWesternphenomenon?

D.H. Well, I think there is little doubt that the development of global relations

and the growing enmeshment of states in economic, cultural and social flows

received an enormous impetus from the expansion of Europe from the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries. And, indeed, if we think for a moment of the British

Empire, itwas a tremendous impetus to the extension of certain Western ideas and

practices. The idea of sovereignty itself, secular conceptions of law, the notion of

individual rights and duties, the concept of the nation-state itself, as Barry has

already indicated, were all ideas which followed in the wake of Western power, as it

expanded and pushed around the world. There is little doubt that one can think of

elements of theprocesses

ofglobalization

aspart

of anessentially

Western

development. However, having said this, one would want to qualify this remark.

Globalization is essentially contested. It is contested in diverse regions of the world.

I do not think the West has ever been in a position simply to 'run' the world

according to its own terms of reference?its 'rules of the game'. These rules have

been contested in parts of Africa, they've been contested in Latin America and Asia;

and they remain contested inmany regions today. The issue has always been to some

extent what form global relations should take and what forms of accountability and

lawmight govern relations among states. This is a fundamental matter, and I think it

is a more pressing one perhaps than Barry does; I'd be interested in his reflections on

this.The urgency of the problem today can be highlighted if we return to something

raised earlier: the whole question of what is a domestic affair and what is a foreign

issue. This is, I believe, a more chronic problem than it used to be. In the era in

which states were being forged, it was understandable for them to think that there

was a clear division between the domestic and the international, the internal and the

external. But now that we have relatively settled nation-states with dense and

complex relations with each other, the issue of what is and what isn't a domestic

issue is problematic. Let me just give you a few examples. The BSE crisis today. Is

that an English issue? A British issue? A European issue? An international issue? A

global issue? It clearly has implications the world over. What is the proper realm of

jurisdiction for resolving this problem? Another example at the heart of our future

health as well is AIDS. Is AIDS something to be dealt with within states? Clearly, it

can't be dealt with within individual states alone, because AIDS has ramifications

for populations around the world. Or, take the issue of energy usage. The use of

energy in the heavily concentrated industrialized areas of the West has direct

implications for the nature of the weather, agriculture, industrial development in,

say, Zimbabwe. Is that a Zimbabwean issue? Take one last example: the question of

British paedophiles meeting in Prague or Bangkok to abuse children. Is this a

British, Czech or Thai problem? Or is it a question with global implications? These

types of questions involve complex ramifications with implications for the verynotion of what is now a proper, legitimate subject for sovereign states to deal with.

And I think this is because there has been, as it were, a 'global shift'. States have

become enmeshed in more complex relations, in denser patterns of inter

connectedness. In this sense, I think Barry's formulation, that the 'realist' part of the

world is now sandwiched inmore complex power systems that have become more

important relative to state power, is absolutely right.








A.Mc. But would not a realist response be that the very issues David seeks to

highlightare

largely marginalto the central dilemmas of world

politics?The critical

issues of war and peace, life and death.

B.B. Again, that is a difficult question for realism because in traditional realism

there was a rather clear distinction between 'high' and 'low' politics, high politics

being about diplomacy and war, and low politics being about economics and

society and many issues like the weather and disease. And because of the change in

the importance of the different sectors that Imentioned earlier, this becomes prob

lematic for realism. But the realists have been fairly agile. The realist line of defence

would be that in most areas of world politics?again the emphasis on politics?

states are still the principal authorities. And there is nothing that stops them from

cooperating with each other. Thus, realists,or

at leasta

good proportion of realists,can live quite comfortably with the idea of international regimes in which states, as

the basic holders of political authority in the system, get together sometimes with

other actors, sometimes just with other states, to discuss issues of joint concern,

and sometimes they can hammer out of a set of policies, a set of rules of the game,

which enable them to coordinate their behaviour. Now, this certainly does not feel

like traditional power politics realism. You can think of it to some extent in terms

of power politics by looking at issue power. Who are the big players in relation to

any big issue? Who are the people who have any kind of control? Who loses out?

etc. There is, therefore, an element of power politics in this whole notion of

regimes, and it does retain a strong element of state-centrism. I think the realistwould say: if you discount the state, where is politics? Where is it located? You

cannot eliminate politics, as some liberals sometimes seem to do. To wish the state

away, to wish politics away, is not going to generate results. The good dyed-in-the

wool realist would argue that power politics is a permanent condition of human

existence. It will come in one form or another, in one domain or another, in relation

to one issue or another, but itwill always be there. It will be politics and itwill be

about relative power. And at the moment, the state is still an important player in

the game.

A.Mc. This brings us to one of the defining differences between realism and

cosmopolitanism. Surely, for realists the centrality of state power and power politics

implies that, normatively speaking, democratic politics and practices have no place

in the management of world order, whereas for cosmopolitans the democratization

of world order is a central ideal? Does not realism assume that regimes and struc

tures of global governance can never be effectively democratized, precisely because

they are dominated by states, state interests and power politics?

B.B. Yes. But what do we mean by democratization in this context?the famous

'define your terms' question! I can answer this in two ways. If you are thinking about

democracy as something based on individual rights?the right to vote and to

determine the shape of the political universe?then the whole realist approach is

very problematic in this regard because, for realists, the proper political domain inwhich individuals sit is the state. There is a problem about how this notion gets

translated upward, and there is also a problem, to the extent that David is right, that

as the state loses control over aspects of its economy and of its society, then

elements of democracy become irrelevant; the state is no longer controlling those

aspects of life for which the people installed democratic control. In this context,

there is a problem about the efficacy and relevance of democracy.








But, if you focus on the principle of democratic voting and think about the way in

which the United Nations and most other internationalagencies

areactually

organized, then it becomes important to recognize that they were formed by demo

cratic states and they do reflect democratic principles. Up to a point inmost of these

agencies, there are rules of voting which bear very close resemblance to democratic

rules of procedure. There is, if you like, a kind of international democracy amongst

states which is based on the notion of sovereignty which sees all states as legally

equal, even if they are not equal powers. One might object to this as a fudge, but

there is in some sense an element of democracy available within the realist vision of

the international system, in the way that states relate to each other as legal equals.

A.Mc. So, the world order is insome sense

already partially democratized. Do youagree?

D.H. Certainly the world order has significant elements of democracy in it. The

late twentieth century has seen a phase of massive democratization around the

world; more states are democratic than ever before. In the mid-1970s, over two-thirds

of all states could reasonably be called authoritarian. This percentage has fallen

dramatically; less than a third of all states are now authoritarian, and the number of

democracies is growing rapidly. Further, the emergence of regional blocs, parti

cularly the European Union, signals the beginnings of the development of

democratic relations among states which is unprecedented in the history of state

relations. The United Nations, in addition, is a remarkable organization insofar as it

brings together, at least in principle, states on equal terms. These and related

developments (such as human rights regimes) have in some respects altered the

balance and the nature of relations among states and the way in which the

representatives of peoples of the world negotiate and treat each other. To that extent

they are very important. But I think, at the same time, they are partial achievements

and have some strong drawbacks and clear limits. They are all, as it were,

organizational systems based by and large on states, and they give priority to

particular state interests. Moreover, they build the hierarchy of state relations and of

existing geopolitical interests into their very structures. Thus, the United Nations

might in principle be a democratic forum, but in practice it is run on a wide range ofissues by dominant US and British interests, with significant contributions, of

course, from other powerful nation-states. Certainly, the procedures of the Security

Council have built into them the veto power of the 'big five' states.

But there is something more important to stress than this. In a world which has

undergone a certain shift away from the sovereign nation-state?marked by the

internationalization of the economy, the development of global financial markets,

new infrastructures of communication (the Internet, for example), the elaboration of

human rights law, and the development of important transborder problems such as

global warming?the plurality of democratic interests can be represented systematic

ally only in a fundamentally different kind of world order. This can be built on someof the strengths of existing institutions: the democratization of the nation-state, the

collaborative relations of some regions, and institutions like the UN. But the process

of democratization has a long way to go. We should not be despondent about this!

Democracy is not simply one fixed notion. It was first elaborated in antiquity

in relation to city-states. It was re-elaborated during the Renaissance in relation

to some of the leading cities of Renaissance Italy. It was reinvented with the








development of nation-states, as liberal representative democracy. And, today, we

are on theedge

of a new fundamental democratic transformation. Historiansmay

look back in a hundred years' time and say liberal representative democracy was that

form of government that emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

only to become somewhat of an anachronism in the late twentieth and twenty-first

centuries as, more and more, the world's fundamental resources and activities were

organized across nation-states boundaries. Some people think that democracy is

fundamentally dysfunctional in a world dominated by regional and global processes

and structures (for instance, the German social theorist, Niklas Luhmann).

However, I believe the contemporary world is one in which we need to reinvent the

idea of democracy, not surrender it. The project of cosmopolitan democracy,

involving the deepening of democracy within nation-states and extending it acrosspolitical borders, is neither optimistic nor pessimistic with respect to these

developments. It is a position of advocacy.

A.Mc. I would like to come back to the essence of the cosmopolitan ideal later.

Barry, I just wondered how you would respond to the cosmopolitan notion of the

deepening of democracy between and within states, or perhaps how a more ortho

dox realist might respond to this cosmopolitan argument?

B.B. I am glad you make that distinction! In a variety of ways I think there is

clearly a problem, and it is not just a problem for realists, about how the world is

structured politically. As I would see it, globalization is primarily an economic

phenomenon. It is also in part a logistical phenomenon to do with transportation

and communication and the ability to move goods, peoples, ideas, etc., around the

world much faster and much more easily than before. But it is not clear what the

alternative political structure to the state is, or how indeed we would make the

transition from the current order to another. So itmay be that the state is in crisis

because of globalization, but there is not yet a very clear alternative available. Even

in the place where one might plausibly look for a model of the future, and I'm

thinking here of the European Union, it is still very problematic as a political

construct. We do not know what the political relationship is when you try and dis

aggregate sovereignty into different levels. It seems like a good idea, but quite howit's going to be made to work is very problematic, and, of course, one of the key

themes of that is the so-called 'democratic deficit'.

How do you move 'representation' upwards and downwards to different levels,

while still keeping some notion of sovereignty which can remain the foundation of

the legal and political order internationally? I think it is fair to say that the inter

national system or the global system is certainly more pluralist than it has ever been.

I do not have any problem with that. But whether it ismore democratic, or can be

so, I am not sure. I would agree that to the extent that more states become demo

cratic, then there will be a spill-over effect and that will have some democratizing

consequences for the world system, but this is not necessarily or always a good

thing. A realist would look at the foreign policy consequences of democracy and say,

well, quite a bit of the time democracies do not behave very well in terms of their

foreign policies. If you look at the United States there is a great problem with

inconsistency and isolationism; democratic polities can take a rather inward-looking,

self-centred view and may reject concerns with managing the rest of the inter

national system. Realists see this as a problem at the moment. I am thinking here of








North America, Europe and Japan. They are all rather inward-looking. They do not

like casualties, theydo not like

spending moneyon

foreignissues. There is a sense in

which, in order to win an American election, candidates now have to say, 'I'm not

going to be a foreign policy president', because if they indicate that kind of interest,

they would probably lose the election. How you actually rejig the global political

structure away from the state, whether democratically or in any other form, is a

problem that simply has not been solved. We may be stuck with states per se.

A.Mc. So the essence, then, of a realist position might be that there is no

alternative, to use that phrase-

TINA-

if you remember the Thatcher era!

D.H. I think there are at least two things Iwould want to say about that. One is

that, of course, democracies are not necessarily simply noble or wise. They are

fallible sets of processes and institutions. But the counterfactual of what Barrywas

suggesting could be taken to imply that the non-democracies of the world would be

more noble or wise under some circumstances and, accordingly, could be considered

a legitimate alternative. The issue in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is that we

do not have an alternative principle of legitimacy for political affairs other than that

of the principle of democracy. It is the principle of legitimate authority and has

rapidly become the only one that is generally, if not universally, accepted, although,

of course, there are great debates about what exactly this means in theory and in

practice.

But the second thing Iwould stress is this. At the moment inwhich the idea of the

secular state was first elaborated, by Bodin, Hobbes and others, itwas largely againstthe background of a very unpromising set of historical circumstances. And yet two

hundred years later, it became the dominant element in the organization of nation

states. If we accept, by contrast and extension, that we live now in a world inwhich

the state has become somewhat decentred and fragmented, locked into complex

transnational processes of cultural, political, economic, legal and technological

power, and so on, then we must begin to consider the political meaning of this, of

living at another fundamental point of transition. And the question it seems tome is

this: how can the idea of the modern state, so fundamentally important to law,

democracy, accountability and so on, be best nurtured and rearticulated in a more

transnational world? In response, the argument I would want to make is that thiscan be achieved only through a cosmopolitan account of democracy, which seeks to

develop the idea of the modern state into a conception of governance, shaped and

circumscribed by 'democratic law', and adapted to the diverse conditions and

interconnections of different peoples and nations.

The notion of cosmopolitan democracy recognizes our complex, interconnected

world. It recognizes, of course, certain problems and policies as appropriate for local

governments and national states; but it also recognizes others as appropriate for

specific regions, and still others, such as elements of the environment, global security

concerns, world health questions and economic regulation, that need new institu

tions to address them. Deliberative and political decision-making centres beyondnational territories are justified when cross-border or transnational groups are

affected significantly by a public matter, when 'lower' levels of decision-making

cannot resolve the issues in question and when the issue of the accountability of a

matter in hand can only itself be understood and redeemed in a transnational, cross

border context. New, innovative political arrangements are not only a necessity but

also, inmy view, a possibility in the light of the changing organization of regional








and global processes, evolving political decision-making centres such as the

European Union,and

growing politicaldemands for new forms of

politicaldelibera

tion, conflict resolution and decision-making. In this emerging world, cities, national

parliaments, regional assemblies and global authorities could all have distinctive but

interlinked roles within a framework of democratic accountability and public

decision-making.

If many contemporary forms of power are to become accountable and ifmany of

the complex issues that affect us all?locally, nationally, regionally and globally?are

to be democratically regulated, people must have access to, and membership in,

diverse political communities. Put differently, democracy for the new millennium

should describe a world where citizens enjoy multiple citizenships. They should be

citizens of theirown

communities, of the wider regions in which they live, and of acosmopolitan global community. We need to develop institutions that reflect the

multiple issues, questions and problems that link people together regardless of the

particular nation-states in which they were born or brought up.

Now, you could immediately object to this as Utopian. But Iwould say to you that

it is no more Utopian than the idea of the modern state was in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries; the latter was (and is) an idea with short-term and long-term

implications. So is cosmopolitan democracy. It is not an issue of all or nothing. For

example, at the global level there are certain small incremental things that would

make a difference now: the reform of the Security Council, enhancing the capacity

of human rights law to be enforced, the creation of a UN peace-keeping and

peacemaking force that would be less dependent on the concerns of existing

geopolitical interests. A commitment to a programme of cosmopolitan democracy is

a commitment to the extension and adaption of the idea of the modern democratic

state and of the idea of democratic accountability to the new global circumstances

in which we live.

A.Mc. Barry, I detected in your argument about globalization and the

democratization of world order that it is not only a question of feasibility, but there

are also very important normative issues at stake. Cosmopolitan or global

democracy, even if it was feasible, may not be the best way to proceed in terms ofhuman political organization. Would that be an adequate representation of your

position?

B.B. That is a difficult question. I think that David is right that posing the

counterfactual requires me to sharpen the implications of my argument. I am not

advocating a world of fascist states or totalitarians or whatever; of course not! I am

merely pointing out that democratization should not be seen as some kind of

universal good; it also carries with it a set of problems. I do not claim to have the

answers to these problems, but I would like to comment a little on the kind of

picture that David is painting. It does seem tome (and I am taking my realist hat off

here, because at this point I am leaving behind the great bulk of realists) that thereare two things to say. First, as the process of globalization unfolds, deepens and

strengthens?and I don't dispute that this is the world we are living in and therefore

that this is a time of transformation?this is going to raise serious questions for

political structure. I think these questions are going to be answered in different ways

in different parts of the global system. My sense is that in the most developed and

most democratic parts of the system, likeWestern Europe and North America, there








is probably going to be a layering of power so that there will be, if you like, an

unpackingor

disaggregationof

sovereignty.Political

authoritywill move

upwardsand downwards, and will exist simultaneously on several different levels. Hedley Bull

once referred to this as neo-medievalism and that is not a bad metaphor in some

ways. This, however, only accounts for those most developed parts of the system,

because what you are looking at here is the interplay between the political units of

the system and the system itself. And what globalization is telling us is that the

system is becoming stronger and stronger in relation to the old political units within

it. Now, the strong political units within the system may survive by adapting and

adopting some kind of neo-medieval framework, but what about the rest? There are

a lot of weak states in the international system and these are going to have much

moredifficulty dealing with life in the strong system. Some of them

arealready

falling to pieces and it would not surprise me, putting on a futurist hat, if a number

of quite substantial unstable zones opened up and became semi-permanent features

of the system: perhaps one centring on Afghanistan, one inWest Africa, and one in

Central Africa. One could imagine there being no effective state structures, indeed

no effective political structures at all in such places except for some kind of reversion

to warlordism, tribalism or gangsterism, or combinations thereof. In some places

this is already the case, and it would not surprise me to see this phenomenon spreadso that one had a part of the world which was very highly organized, postmodern

perhaps; parts of the world which had politically collapsed; and then bits in between

like China, India, the so-called modern developing world. It is not quite clear to mewhat is going to happen to these latter states. They have a really tough game to play.

Looking ahead a bit further and trying to wear David's hat a bit more, I can

imagine a world in which there might be no states at all in the sense that we now

understand them. However, one could still wear a realist hat and say well, all right,we might be in the post-state world, but there will still be plenty of power politics

around. Itmay be pluralist, itmay be democratic, itmay be structured in all kinds of

odd ways, but the logic of power politics will go on and to that extent the realist

tradition will remain intact.

A.Mc. So the circumstances for cosmopolitan democracy are not terribly

propitious.D.H. Well, I do not think that would be an entirely accurate summary of what

has just been said! In any case, I think what has been said is reasonably cautious;

and who could disagree with an element of caution? One might perhaps be even

more cautious than has been suggested so far. It seems tome extremely important to

bear in mind that the West itself nearly destroyed democracy just fifty years ago.

Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism almost destroyed this 'democratizing civilization'.

The contingency and unpredictability of politics iswith us at all times; accordingly,one cannot be complacent about the continued democratization either of the West

or of other parts of the world. Against this background, one can anticipate other

fundamental threats, not simply threats from nation-states that are fragile such asthose in sub-Saharan Africa, but again from the West itself. One of the most

fundamental challenges that might arise in the next century may well follow from the

attempt by many parts of the world to emulate Western systems of lifestyle, resource

use, consumption patterns and so on. There will be fundamental environmental

obstacles to their extension. There may come a point where the West's interest in

defending its conditions of life may bring it into sharp conflict with other parts of








the world. The environmental costs of Western lifestyles may well make the pursuit

of them elsewhere unsustainable. The Westmay

well not think that therising

demand for raw materials and new energy sources, the extension of industrialization

and environmental degradation, and the unmanaged growth of population inmany

parts of the world is necessarily in its own interests, and serious conflict could

follow.

We live in a moment of transition. Many of the old political ideologies are

fraught with difficulty. Liberalism has no conception of how one might regulate

markets in order to build environmental concerns systematically into market forces.

State socialist theories are worn thin if not dead. Many of our political ideologies

are at the point of bankruptcy. The task of the political theorist, then, is to rethink

our political concepts and to createnew

conceptualresources

whichcan be

reflexively applied in the contemporary world. The idea of state sovereignty, as it

were, was elaborated by political theorists and reflexively applied to the new state

structures of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I think ideas such as

cosmopolitan democracy?but there are many other parallel ideas as well?are

contributions to new debates about what these structures will look like, and to the

extent that these debates are open it becomes possible to lay down new normative

resources, new normative conceptions, which might have some bite when people

come to think about how a more multilayered system of authority, in a

multidimensional world, can begin to cohere in a way which is consistent with the

principle of democratic legitimacy.

1998 Realism vs Cosmopolitanism

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Transcript of 1998 Realism vs Cosmopolitanism