Twilight of sovereignty or the emergence of cosmopolitan norms? Rethinking citizenship in volatile times

Abstract

This essay examines recent debates concerning the emergence of cosmopolitan norms such as those pertaining to universal human rights, crimes against humanity as well as refugee, immigrant and asylum status. What some see as the spread of a new human rights regime and a new world order others denounce as the “spread of empire” or characterize as “law without a state”. In contrast, by focusing on the relationship of global capitalism to deterritorialized law this essay distinguishes between the spread of human rights norms and deterritorialized legal regimes. Although both cosmopolitan norms and deterritorialized law challenge the nation-state and threaten to escape control by democratic legislatures, it argues that cosmopolitan norms enhance popular sovereignty while many other forms of global law undermine it. It concludes by pleading for a vision of “republican federalism” and “democratic iterations”, which would enhance popular sovereignty by establishing interconnections across the local, the national and the global.