<p> </p><p>In exploring how to decisively address global poverty the question of what should be the content of nations’ global justice duties has been debatable. Nationalism has usually been regarded as incompatible with cosmopolitanism. It is against extending principles of social justice to the entire globe as cosmopolitanism demands on the grounds that the global context lacks the special attachments that generate national solidarity which is regarded as what ensures distributive justice realizable. For nationalism there cannot be motivation for global distributive justice since this solidarity is only national. As such the nationalist perspective holds that only humanitarian obligations constitute global justice duties. Nationalists also restrict global justice duties to humanitarian assistance due to the fact that nations have a moral obligation to respect another nation’s political culture’s values manifested in the type of national policies they pursue. For nationalists fulfilling the moral requirement of mutual respect of nations’ political cultures would entail letting nations face the consequences of their preferred choices which in some cases lead to poverty. Only when a humanitarian crisis looms do other nations have moral obligations of helping out. Cosmopolitanism agrees with the idea of respecting nations’ right to self-determination and letting nations face consequences of their choices. However it demands the precondition that the background context in which the self-determination is exercised should be just and fair. This demands that before nations respect poor nations’ political cultures the global cooperation which interferes with the exercise of self-determination should be rid of its interference tendencies that negatively restrict nations’ choices. It further demands that nations’ political cultures that are harmful to individuals by subjecting them to poverty ought to be reformed. What cosmopolitanism demands is that there should be a new understanding of nationalism with respect to the individual as the ultimate unit of moral concern. It also regards the lack of solidarity on the globe context as a resolvable challenge that would be faced in the implementation of global justice in the non-ideal real life. It does not in any way invalidate the moral worth of cosmopolitan principles of justice.</p><p> </p>

<p>The problem of world poverty is appalling in human terms. Almost half of all the humankind lives below the poverty line of $2 per day, whereas affluent parts of the world continue to enjoy enormous technological and economical progress. In the light of such discrepancy, the debate in political philosophy regarding “global justice” has renewed significance. The current debate between those who agree global justice is important, is those who think that positive duties towards poor is enough, and those who think that morality requires a re-designation of the ground rules operating at the global level.</p><p>The Cosmopolitan view grounds its theoretical framework in this second view. This study aims to analyse if, and how, the normative debate in the European Parliament reflects the assumptions, arguments and considerations of the Cosmopolitan approach. This study identifies central concepts of the Cosmopolitan approach, and then analyses how these concepts are discussed in the European Parliamentary debates. In addition, I identify who discusses what in the parliamentary debates. The analysis reveals how Cosmopolitan ideas are reflected in the discourse within the debates, and the second dimension identifies which party groups discuss and hold which key concepts of Cosmopolitanism.</p>

<p>This study examines Irish modernist literature in order to complicate established critical modes which read modernist movements as reflective of distinctly vernacular or cosmopolitan aesthetic and political commitments. I argue that neither recent models of vernacular modernism nor older models of cosmopolitan modernism entirely account for the stylistic innovations and formal experiments of modernist literature. Instead, modernist writers negotiate a field of tension between the poles of cosmopolitan and vernacular, and demonstrate that their works represent forms of identity that accommodate elements of both national belonging and cosmopolitan individualism. </p><p>Examining works by four authors - William Butler Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, and Raymond Queneau - this project argues that modernist literature represents a set of idiosyncratic, dynamic efforts to negotiate the tensions between the limits of the nation-state system and a variety of emerging transnational modes of cultural exchange in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nature of modernist writers' efforts to negotiate a period of passage between national and global systems of exchange is, I think, especially visible in the case of Irish modernism. Ireland's transition from a part of the United Kingdom to an independent nation-state in the interwar period makes that nation's literature an exemplary case for my argument, as does the critical importance of Irish writing in the modernist canon. </p><p>By examining these and other critical and historical perspectives alongside a sampling of plays, novels, short stories, and memoirs, this study makes the case that modernist literary aesthetics spring from writers' efforts to make sense of competing desires for national belonging and cosmopolitan autonomy. Focusing on works that cross categorical boundaries between Irish and cosmopolitan modernism, this study traces the ways in which modernist aesthetics construct dynamic, adaptive relationships between the global and the national, and suggest that we can imagine them as something other than static, exclusive alternatives.</p> / Dissertation

This project explores how cosmopolitan personas rhetorically negotiate the space between local and global, discursively tying people to the national as well as to the global or transnational. It examines the possible co-existence of cosmopolitanism and nationalism while identifying how each is articulated in response to the other. As global networks become increasingly complex, rethinking borders and how they are articulated is essential. Can a quintessential cosmopolitan also be a public nationalist? Are cosmopolitan discourses compromised by their presumed lack of attachment to the local? To what extent and with what success are cosmopolitanism and nationalism siultaneously articulated? In order to study these and other questions, I analyze the public personas crafted by cosmopolitan figures Vaclav Havel, Jimmy Carter, and Edward Said. By illuminating how they negotiate that ambiguous space between locale and its absence, a project attentive to the rhetorical possibilities of discursive connection in a world increasingly devoid of shared loyalties and histories enables a fuller understanding of the possibilites of intercultural contact in a globalizing world.

If morally arbitrary features (that is, blind brute luck) should have no impact on the distribution of wealth, then the vast inequality and the disparity in life prospects between countries is a moral catastrophe; birthplace is completely based on luck, and yet has an enormous impact on life prospects. I contend that those in affluent countries, who have benefited from the luck of birthplace, ought to work towards a more egalitarian world, in which luck plays as little a role in life prospects as possible.

In exploring how to decisively address global poverty the question of what should be the content of nations’ global justice duties has been debatable. Nationalism has usually been regarded as incompatible with cosmopolitanism. It is against extending principles of social justice to the entire globe as cosmopolitanism demands on the grounds that the global context lacks the special attachments that generate national solidarity which is regarded as what ensures distributive justice realizable. For nationalism there cannot be motivation for global distributive justice since this solidarity is only national. As such the nationalist perspective holds that only humanitarian obligations constitute global justice duties. Nationalists also restrict global justice duties to humanitarian assistance due to the fact that nations have a moral obligation to respect another nation’s political culture’s values manifested in the type of national policies they pursue. For nationalists fulfilling the moral requirement of mutual respect of nations’ political cultures would entail letting nations face the consequences of their preferred choices which in some cases lead to poverty. Only when a humanitarian crisis looms do other nations have moral obligations of helping out. Cosmopolitanism agrees with the idea of respecting nations’ right to self-determination and letting nations face consequences of their choices. However it demands the precondition that the background context in which the self-determination is exercised should be just and fair. This demands that before nations respect poor nations’ political cultures the global cooperation which interferes with the exercise of self-determination should be rid of its interference tendencies that negatively restrict nations’ choices. It further demands that nations’ political cultures that are harmful to individuals by subjecting them to poverty ought to be reformed. What cosmopolitanism demands is that there should be a new understanding of nationalism with respect to the individual as the ultimate unit of moral concern. It also regards the lack of solidarity on the globe context as a resolvable challenge that would be faced in the implementation of global justice in the non-ideal real life. It does not in any way invalidate the moral worth of cosmopolitan principles of justice.

<p>The persistent presence of refugees challenges political theorists to rethink our approaches to citizenship and national sovereignty. I look to philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), who brings to the Western tradition her insight as a refugee who attended to other refugees. Deploying the tropes of Threshold, Refuge, and Attention (which I garner and elaborate from her writings) I read Weil as an eminently political theorist whose practice of befriending political strangers maintains the urgent, interrogative insight of the refugee while tempering certain "temptations of exile." On my reading, Weil's body of theory travels physically and conceptually among plural, intersecting, and conflicting bodies politic, finding in each a source of limited, imperfect, and precious Refuge.</p><p>I then put Weil into conversation with several contemporary scholars - Michael Walzer, Martha Nussbaum, and Kwame Anthony Appiah - each of whom takes up a problematic between duties to existing political community and the call to engagements with political strangers. Bringing Weilian theory to bear on this conversation, I argue that polity depends deeply on those who heed the call to assume variously particular, vocational, and unenforceable duties across received borders. </p><p>Finally, by way of furthering Weil's incomplete experiments in Attention to the other, I look to "accompaniment" and related strategies adopted by human rights activists in recent decades in the Americas. These projects, I suggest, display many traits in common with Weil's political sensibility, but they also demonstrate possibilities beyond those imagined by Weil herself. As such, they provide practical guidance to those of us confronting political failures and refugee flows in the Western hemisphere today. I conclude that politico-humanitarian movements' own bodies of theory and practice point the way to sustained, cross-border, political relations.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2009. / Thesis directed by Michael P. Zuckert for the Department of Political Science. "December 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 418-423).

As they took stock of the ways that the Great Migration and America’s post-war global role were changing the South, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray crafted narratives that articulated a particular perspective on the South. These writers dreamed of putting the regionally distinctive characteristics that they found valuable in the South into conversation with a sense of expansiveness and possibility, one that they associated with a migratory and increasingly globally-connected nation. In this project, I examine these southern cosmopolitan negotiations in Wright, McCullers, Ellison, and Murray’s southern narratives, and I argue that these writers are crucial to our understanding of the post-migration South in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Philosophy / Master / Master of Philosophy