From Westphalia to Cosmopolis?

This is the second volume in a two-volume work contrasting two alternative world orders and assessing their comparative strengths and weaknesses and the chances for, and obstacles to, gradually moving from one to the other. Providing an alternative to unlimited sovereign rights covered in the first volume on the Westphalian system, with Cosmopolitan order states matter significantly less. This volume questions what happens when states do not honour their obligation to comply with certain rules. Fairly obviously is the forfeiting of its sovereign rights to another state or a world organisation such as the United Nations. Outlining the conceptual history of cosmopolitanism, this study identifies several logical flaws in the concept as often used as well as logical implications not always taken duly into account. Having thus effectively discarded the concept as either politically irrelevant or logically incoherent, it nevertheless retains the term as an appropriate label for a direction as opposed to a final destination. Speculative and philosophical, not only summing up how far the world has moved towards a more cosmopolitan order where concern for the well-being of people triumphs over state sovereignty, but also looking at potential next steps such as military interventions for the sake of the environment on which we are all existentially dependent. It also addresses the question of ’humanness’ which turns out to be more complicated than often assumed.