The Cosmopolitan Imperative: Global Justice Through Accountable Integration

Luis Cabrera

Arizona State University West

Paper Submitted to Mini-Conference on Global Justice, held in Conjunction with the APA Pacific Division Meeting, March 27-30, Pasadena, CA

Abstract

Cosmopolitan theorists hold that moral and political boundaries do not coincide, and that obligations to redistribute resources and often opportunities do not halt at state borders. However, while cosmopolitans say our moral concern should be global, most do not advocate a restructuring of the global system to achieve their distributive aims. This essay argues that such a transformation is necessary to enable cosmopolitan distributions, because the foundational norms of the sovereign states system encourage promotion and protection of the immediate citizen set while they discourage high-level transstate distributions. Such distributions are further discouraged by a kind of “own-case bias” at work in sovereign states, and by the instrumental concerns of leaders to satisfy key sectors in their own polities. Movement toward a more integrated global system would encourage the view that larger sets of persons have interests in common that should be protected and promoted in common. The still-evolving European Union is examined as a partial model for the integrated alternative. Possibilities for further EU integration, and for movement toward integration elsewhere, are explored via a broadly functionalist current in recent international political economy.