Representative Cosmopolitanism: Representing the World within Political Collectives

Abstract

Nation-states chop up the modern political sphere into autonomous (sovereign) communities. A vast literature questions the adequacy of this territorial, container-based order in the face of increasingly global patterns of interaction. A remedy is sought in a cosmopolitanization of the political sphere, above all by establishing institutions and by strengthening forms of governance on the international or supranational level. This paper develops an alternative and complementary conception of cosmopolitanization, which stresses the representation of the external world within political institutions. Representative cosmopolitanism is a conception which offers a nonterritorially garbled political representation on a global scale in spite of the territorial organization of political institutions and the political sphere. Instead of overcoming the problematic kind of political exclusion which structures the modern political sphere by establishing new institutional levels, the paper aims to expand the sensitivity and thematic reach of existing political collectives.