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Cosmopolitanism restated : a choice-based consequentialist perspective on global democratic inclusion : the cases of migration and world federalism

Seeking to tackle the widely acknowledged democratic deficit of current international affairs, the argument presented here for consequentialist cosmopolitanism sets itself apart from other international political theories, in that it provides a normative framework for an all-inclusive global politics. Such a framework offers a critical alternative to the phenomenon of international political exclusion as legitimised by a number of influential theories of justice, including realism, nationalism, contractarianism, harm theory and the cosmopolitan project. Deriving from an examination of international consequentialist thought over the last two hundred years, the model developed here combines a new ethical interpretation of consequentialist principles with a new political interpretation of cosmopolitan principles. From this combination, a theory of consequentialist cosmopolitanism is drawn which utilises a single principle of justice on different levels of political action. That principle is the maximisation of the world welfare condition. Within this setting, the promotion of global welfare is pursued through the deployment of procedural instruments in terms of rights. In particular, the right to freedom of choice and the right to political participation form the core of the normative project. The institutional recognition of these rights as universal entitlements, in fact, is crucial in order to delineate an enfranchising conception of political agency in each level of political action, including the global. Evidence in favour of the proposed version of non-exclusionary cosmopolitanism is provided in examples of two case studies of such enlarged citizenship: a horizontal case concerned with migration, and a vertical case regarding supranational institutions as embedded in a system of cosmo-federal democracy.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:416921
Date January 2005
CreatorsMarchetti, Raffaele
PublisherLondon School of Economics and Political Science (University of London)
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://etheses.lse.ac.uk/1780/

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